Sciences and the Humanities

The Sciences and the Humanities: Conflict and Reconciliation by W. T. Jones confronts one of the most enduring dilemmas of modern culture: the apparent chasm between scientific rationalism and humanistic traditions of value, purpose, and meaning. Opening with vivid analogies drawn from learning experiments with rats faced with indiscernible choices, Jones suggests that contemporary men and women likewise respond neurotically to situations where conceptual frameworks have collapsed, whether in foreign policy crises or private dilemmas. He argues that the roots of this malaise lie not only in political or social disarray but also in mistaken metaphysical assumptions—specifically, an absolutism that few genuinely believe yet continue to carry unconsciously. From Plato’s struggle against relativism to Galileo’s reorganization of the perceptual field and St. Paul’s radically divergent interpretation of his Damascus experience, Jones demonstrates how metaphysical frameworks undergird everyday ways of resolving problems, and how their breakdown generates anxiety.

Against this backdrop, Jones examines the “two cultures” debate of C. P. Snow as not simply a social divide between scientists and humanists, but as an internal rift within modern consciousness. Scientists, he notes, are also husbands, parents, and moral beings; humanists, conversely, cannot evade scientific conceptions. Yet inherited dualisms of mind and matter render their vocabularies incommensurable, producing what Jones calls uninterpretable situations. His analysis traverses literature, art, and philosophy: from Dante’s cosmic justice to Hardy’s mechanistic despair, from Camus’ absurdity to Faulkner’s stoical codes, he shows how twentieth-century art expresses a crisis of meaning born of the scientific worldview’s reductionism. Rejecting both nostalgic revivals of absolutism and escapist existential retreats, Jones proposes that philosophy’s task is to reconstruct a conceptual language that acknowledges relativity, ambiguity, and hazard while reconciling fact with value. The book’s central claim is both diagnostic and prescriptive: only by confronting, rather than evading, the conflict between science and the humanities can modern culture achieve intellectual coherence and moral maturity.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1965.