How Interdisciplinary Is God?

Abstract

A n ugly duckling , I grewupintoaphilologist.Myschooling— I was the last of the Victorians—was focused on the classical languages (when we weren’t playing rugby or cricket). Pupils were streamed according to their ability in Latin and Greek (science was only for dummies), and the height of sophistication for us at age 16—this was the 1970s, mind—was translating Racine from French into Greek verse. I studied only Greek, Latin, and English through my last and most formative years of high school, before reading classics at Cambridge. I am still proud enough to be called a philologist, especially now that it has become a really trendy moniker again. Through a process too long and complicated to tell, however—but much indebted to Professor Sir Geoffrey Lloyd, who has written about the interdisciplinary and cross-cultural study of themind for this journal—I have been for the last six years thedirector of what has become the largest and most active interdisciplinary humanities and social science research center around (CRASSH): we currently have forty-three postdoctoral fellows on long-term contracts,