Creative and Critical Thinking in the Arts and Sciences: Some Examples of Congruence (Report)

Introduction In his landmark 1959 Rede lecture and subsequent publication, physicist Charles Percy Snow expressed concerns over what he saw as a growing rift between scientific and literary scholarly communities (Snow 1959). In the fifty years since that time, scholars and other commentators have expended a great deal of intellectual capital in the analysis of observed cultural differences between the sciences on one side, and the arts and humanities on the other. While it is important to acknowledge and explore these differences, both perceived and actual, it is also worthwhile to recognize those ideas and practices shared in common between the two cultures.