Peter Burke on polymathy

We’re starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel with respect to good definitions of polymathy. The other day I talked about Edward Carr’s “breadth” test and Carl Djerassi’s influence and acceptance tests for polymathy.

Today, we’ll talk about four separate ways to think about polymathy. They come from the distinguished Cambridge historian Peter Burke, who is most well known as a historian of the Renaissance, but who has also written a couple of excellent books on knowledge and cultural history. In fact, he calls himself a cultural historian.

He has also done a lot of thinking about polymathy recently. In his 2010 essay, “The polymath: A cultural and social history of an intellectual species,” he proposed a new understanding of the modern polymath that has attempted to take into account the limitations on polymathy caused by specialization. He lamented that polymathy “has been diluted to refer to people who have mastered two or three disciplines,” and suggested categorizing the modern polymath into four distinct groups:

1.                  The passive polymaths, who read widely but make their reputation in one discipline alone.

2.                  The limited polymaths, active in a small cluster of neighboring disciplines.

3.                  The serial polymaths, whose interests gradually shifted from one discipline to others.

4.                  Most remarkable of all, is a fourth group, proper polymaths who have continued to work in several fields and to make serious contributions to all of them, keeping several balls in the air at the same time rather than picking them up one by one.

Finally, we’re getting somewhere with understanding what a polymath really is. Professor Burke has nailed it in my opinion.

I’ll leave you to think about his classification overnight, and we’ll talk more about it later.