The Tübingen Forum for Science and the Humanities is happy to announce the opening of the Essay Contest 2022 on the theme “Unity of Knowledge? Building Bridges between the Humanitites and the Sciences".

The increasing specialization of the sciences since the 19^th century led to the development of scientific disciplines working in isolation from each other. The fundamental question of the unity of science beyond university structures is rarely raised, and the modern world’s dream of one universal science seems like a very distant goal. In particular, the sharp division between the humanities and the natural sciences seems to be deeply rooted.

This division manifests itself on at least three levels. First, scholars of the humanities and natural scientists, as C. P. Snow famously writes (The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, 1959) are considered to have a fundamentally different mentality, belonging to two contrary „cultures”. Second, methodologically, the humanities and the natural sciences are contrasted in dichotomies such explaining vs. understanding. Lastly, the division manifests itself as an institutional asymmetry: the humanities keep losing academic chairs, funding, and students worldwide, while in the natural and engineering sciences the opposite tendency can be observed.

Can we reinvent and redesign the relationship between the humanities and the natural sciences? Can we build bridges between them? How can we conceive of their relationship in such a way that both can benefit from each other?