Humanista z duszą humanisty...

Abstract

The title of this paper is provocative with respect to the title of the book. The aim was to indicate that the latter may be interpreted as suggesting that a humanistic attitude in engineers is a rare virtue, and thus that engineering fits well into the Two Cultures divide that was famously discussed by. C.P. Snow. This paper pertains to this problem from the perspective of human creative activity. It is argued that if considered on a sufficiently abstract level, human creative activity shows features that are domain-independent. This pertains, in particular, to epistemic activity (which deals with “what is”) as well as to poietic activity (which deals with “what is to be”). The main conclusion is that understanding the commonality of epistemic and poietic activity may help in overcoming the Two Cultures syndrome.