Beyond the two cultures: Democratic virtues and the case for a model of mutuality

Abstract

Fifty years ago and still relevant today, C.P. Snow argued that the university is divided into two cultures, with humanities on the one side and the sciences on the other. This paper proposes a model of mutuality to overcome this ongoing divide as applied specifically to political philosophy and its cognate scientific disciplines of political science and political psychology. On the model of mutuality, not only can political philosophy inform theorizing and hypothesis-formation in political science and psychology, the latter fields also serve as data for political philosophy. More importantly, collaboration between philosophers and scientists can inform a conceptual dialectic that significantly benefits both areas of inquiry. The second half of the paper develops the example of democratic virtues as a case study. Capitalizing on existing work in philosophical virtue theory and related areas of psychology, I propose that the topic of democratic and not merely civic virtues is a novel area of inquiry that would profit from mutual engagement between political philosophers and political scientists and psychologists.