The belief that researchers need to specialise goes back at least two centuries. From the beginning of the 19th Century, research has primarily been the preserve of universities. Ever since, says Stefan Collini, Professor of Intellectual History and English Literature at Cambridge University, researchers have labels attached to them. “They’re professor of this or that, and you get a much more self-conscious sense of the institutional divides between domains of knowledge.”
Before then, there were some polymaths who made original contributions in multiple areas. The word polymath stems from the Greek, polus, meaning “much” or “many” and mathe, meaning “learning”. The first use of the word has been traced to the 17th Century. From the Renaissance, people such as Leonardo da Vinci – painter, sculptor, architect, physicist, anatomist, philosopher, geologist and biologist – gave rise to a synonym of polymath, the “Renaissance man”….
Stefan Collini says that in many Western societies “there is a populist hostility to expertise in public life”. It may be that polymaths, with their broader gaze, have an important role in communicating specialist fields. What’s more, with ever narrowing specialism there is a need for generalists to synthesise information, to make connections between the discipline silos.
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