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Artists and Engineers1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 April 2015

D. H. Mellor
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Abstract

I dispute a widespread contrast between the sciences and the humanities that undervalues the latter compared to the former. This contrast assumes that science is more valuable than the humanities because it is more useful, an assumption I reject on the grounds that (a) science is not more useful than the humanities and (b) the value of usefulness, being instrumental, depends on the non-instrumental value of what it's usefulness for. I conclude that science is not made more valuable than the humanities either by its instrumental or by its non-instrumental value.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy , Volume 90 , Issue 3 , July 2015 , pp. 393 - 402
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 2015 

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Footnotes

1

Ancestors of this paper were presented and discussed at the Cambridge University Moral Sciences club on 9th October 2012, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on 1st May 2013, Dalhousie University on 3rd May 2013, and King's College London on 28th February 2014. My revisions of them owe much to helpful comments made on those and later occasions.

References

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9 Op. cit. note 8, 21.

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11 ‘… an insufficient but necessary part of a condition which is itself unnecessary but sufficient for the result’, Mackie, J. L., ‘Causes and Conditions’, in Causation, ed. Sosa, E. and Tooley, M. (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1993), 34 Google Scholar.