Autumn 2009

A SCHOOL FOR POLYMATHS

Emily Bobrow — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 19:43:46 +0000

Can polymathy be taught? In the autumn issue of Intelligent Life Edward Carr laments that we seem to be experiencing a polymathy end of days--alas, our accumulated knowledge in any given field makes it far too difficult to become an expert in more than one. But one reader has suggested that the problem may lurk within our educational institutions, which shove students along narrow career paths without teaching all the short-cuts and connections in between:

The explosion of knowledge that has taken place in the 20th century is not the root cause of the hyperspecialization we see today: the attitude of our society--and particularly our educational institutions--towards polymathy is. Our educational system has been reduced to a form of vocational training, but there is more to the concept of "education": what of learning, creation, and discovery?...

With others, I am involved with an effort to create a school for polymaths. It isn't going to be easy - we're up against a highly entrenched status quo - but challenges at the frontiers of knowledge are becoming increasingly interdisciplinary in nature, and we can no longer afford to approach them from a strictly monomathic perspective if we hope to succeed in solving them.

I'm delighted by the idea that polymathy can be learned (my hopes for becoming a true Renaissance woman--the kind that isn't uneducated, consumptive and pregnant by 15--need not be dashed). But how would a polymath-inspiring curriculum compare with a more ordinary one? read more »

FOXES, HEDGEHOGS AND AIRWAVES

Emily Bobrow — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 13:34:07 +0000

Edward Carr ends his piece about polymaths with a plaintive observation:

Isaiah Berlin once divided thinkers into two types. Foxes, he wrote, know many things; whereas hedgehogs know one big thing. The foxes used to roam free across the hills. Today the hedgehogs rule.

(This is Berlin's take on an epigram by Archilochus, as one reader observes.) This morning Carr rued this state of affairs on Andrew Marr's Start of the Week radio show (yes, that Andrew Marr, he of the soothing, radio-show baritone and perhaps a polymath of sorts himself). He considered the question: How is it that in a time of more learning and wider access to education, we have so few polymaths? read more »

POLYMATHS: 20 LIVING EXAMPLES

Ed Cumming — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 21:45:24 +0000

A main feature for the autumn issue of Intelligent Life magazine looks at the decline of the polymath. The author, Edward Carr, argues that in this age of specialisation, the polymath has become an endangered species. For an accompanying table, we set about identifying living examples. We asked around the office, inviting nominations from the staff of Intelligent Life and The Economist. The names that came in were highly varied, overwhelmingly male, mostly Anglophone and all over the age of 45.

In the end we included only those who were reckoned to excel in diverse fields; among the scientists, we limited our choice to those, such as Roger Penrose, whose writing has attracted wide acclaim. Here is a selection of the most persuasive candidates, plus the odd wild card. We have listed their principal activities and put them in order of the number of strings they have to their bow. Don't agree with our choices? Feel free to add your own.

5 STRINGS

Nathan Myhrvold: American, 51.
Computer scientist, physicist, entrepreneur, photographer, chef

Richard Posner: American, 70.
Judge, literary critic, economist, political theorist, philosopher

Jared Diamond: American, 71.
Anthropologist, geographer, physiologist, author, ornithologist

Brian Eno: British, 61.
Musician, record producer, visual artist, political activist, diarist

Bruce Dickinson: British, 51.
Singer, TV presenter, pilot, TV presenter, record producer, fencer

4 STRINGS

Noam Chomsky: American, 80. read more »