Defending Disciplines in an Interdisciplinary Age

For the past generation, academic disciplines have been under attack as bastions of conservatism, the enemies of progress, and barriers to original thinking. An interdisciplinary “consilience” has been advanced as the solution to problems of academic inertia and defensiveness. Recent years have provided several examples of interdisciplinary work that seeks to blend the humanities and the sciences. Darwinian literary studies, scaling, and the...