• Introduction
• Herbert Tucker and Bruce Holsinger

Polymathy—the achievement of distinction in multiple arenas of intellectual endeavor—commands attention wherever it appears. Yet we don't quite know what to make of it. Wonder, honor, envy, suspicion, and dismissal may all confusedly arise in ordinary souls when they confront a versatile excellence that, by outstripping their own modest capacity in mind and body, exposes its limits. Where those souls are academic and tread the path of approved scholarship (per Thomas Kuhn's "normal science"), the polymathic exception is especially liable to be received as violating the rules, which learning has set in place to preserve the good order of its realm and the academy maintains under the sign, or badge, of methodology.¹ In the name of the various disciplines (professing, as their common denominator, a strong regard for discipline in the workaday sense), we gatekeeping monomaths and bimaths are not slow to decry the polymath as a trespasser, a dilettantish amateur, or a fraud pretending to levels of mastery that have neglected the protocols that enforce the difference between an ascertained truth and a lucky guess.

Such reactions to the polymathic phenomenon are completely understandable defenses—of intellectual ego, in the first instance, but beyond that of institutional structures of knowledge to which professions and careers owe fealty. Yet these, like other defenses, come at a cost, be it a hardening of mental outlook that precludes recognition of eccentric insights or even our stunned acknowledgment of those rare cases that break through the disciplinary shield in spite of the barriers we have put in place. For we are strongly predisposed to know polymathically heroic knowers in the same way, and according to the same measure, that governs the rest of what we know. We discipline polymathy by a sort of additive reduction, counting on our fingers the accomplishments of Alexander von Humboldt, or Hildegard of Bingen, or (the indispensable arts-and-sciences poster-boy) Leonardo da Vinci. Looking at two eminent chemists, Alexander Borodin and Joseph Needham, we marvel that the one was also a distinguished composer of music, the other also a [End Page 1299] pioneering Western Sinologist. True enough, and of course remarkable. But to stop at such accountancy of genius is to reinforce the disciplinary siloing that sanctions all the rest of our knowledge. Reducing polymaths to our own antecedent categories, we make them exceptions that prove the rule and ratify an order of things that their extraordinary example might instead prompt us to question.

Whatever plurality of enterprises a given exemplar undertakes and drives forward, all polymaths in effect, and some of them explicitly, pose a challenge to disciplinary business as usual. This is most obviously true of the premodern polymaths, whose feats of learning were, in their eyes and in the eyes of their contemporaries, not transgressively promiscuous but cumulatively integral, within a curricular regime of knowledge antedating the fracture lines of Enlightenment inquiry and the division of university labor into departments and subfields. Among the essays that follow, Ahmed al-Rahim's detailed history describes within the early Islamic centuries not one such regime but successive different regimes, each of which entailed an exhaustively polythematic education upon a more or less theocratic civil service. Something of the same kind might, we observe, be predicated of the medieval West that produced such paragons as Hildegard and Albertus Magnus and laid foundations that would in time support the intellectual acrobatics of da Vinci and others. The Seven Liberal Arts of the European Middle Ages, much like our own, may be a training ground for polymathy, instilling discipline—from the Latin disciplina for instruction or training, but also a term of art for a small scourge or whip, a memory-image of torture popular in depictions of the medieval schoolroom. Polymathy entails hard and often tortuous work on both body and mind, yet the resistance it fosters to specialization may prove, at least for certain of its designates, as antidisciplinary as it is interdisciplinary.

How to organize and coordinate newly centrifugal learning conducted in expanding quarters of the modern noosphere emerged during the Enlightenment as a problem of an unprecedented kind. It was...

• 介绍
• 赫伯特·塔克和布鲁斯·霍尔辛格

通才——在智力努力的多个领域取得杰出成就——无论出现在哪里都会引起人们的注意。但我们不太知道该怎么理解它。当普通人的灵魂面对多才多艺的卓越时，惊奇、荣誉、嫉妒、怀疑和排斥都可能会混乱地出现在他们身上，而这种卓越超越了他们自己在思想和身体上的谦虚能力，暴露了其局限性。如果这些灵魂是学术性的，并走上公认的学术道路（根据托马斯·库恩的“正常科学”），博学的例外尤其容易被认为违反了规则，而学习已经制定了这些规则来维护其领域的良好秩序学院以方法论为标志或徽章。¹以各种学科的名义（自称对日常意义上的纪律的强烈尊重，作为它们的共同点），我们守门的一元数学家和二数学家毫不犹豫地谴责博学者是侵入者、业余爱好者或骗子假装自己掌握了一定的水平，却忽略了区分已确定的真相和幸运猜测之间的协议。

对博学现象的这种反应是完全可以理解的——首先是对知识自我的防御，但超出了职业和事业所效忠的知识制度结构的防御。然而，与其他防御一样，这些防御措施也是有代价的，无论是精神面貌的强化，使我们无法承认古怪的见解，还是我们震惊地承认那些尽管我们设置了障碍，但仍突破纪律屏障的罕见案例。 。因为我们强烈倾向于以同样的方式、按照同样的标准来认识博学的英雄认识者，这决定了我们所知道的其他知识。我们通过一种加法还原来训练多才多艺，用手指数着亚历山大·冯·洪堡、宾根的希尔德加德或（不可或缺的艺术与科学海报男孩）列奥纳多·达·芬奇的成就。看看两位杰出的化学家亚历山大·鲍罗丁和李约瑟，我们惊奇地发现，一个也是一位杰出的音乐作曲家，另一个也是一位[完第1299页]西方汉学家的先驱。确实如此，当然也很了不起。但停止对天才的这种核算就会强化学科孤岛，从而制裁我们所有其他知识。将博学者归结为我们自己的先行类别，我们将他们视为例外，以证明规则并批准事物的顺序，而他们的非凡例子可能反而会促使我们质疑。

无论一个特定的范例承担并推动何种多元化的企业，所有博学多才的人实际上，其中一些明确地，对照常的纪律业务提出了挑战。对于前现代的博学者来说，这是最明显的事实，在他们和同时代人的眼中，他们的学习成就并不是越界的混杂，而是在早于启蒙运动探究和分裂的断裂线之前的知识课程体系中累积的整体。大学劳动分为院系和子领域。在接下来的文章中，艾哈迈德·拉希姆详细的历史描述了伊斯兰早期世纪中的不是一个这样的政权，而是连续不断的不同政权，每一个政权都需要对或多或少的神权政治服务进行详尽的多神教育。我们观察到，类似的情况可能会发生在中世纪的西方，那里产生了希尔德加德和阿尔伯特·马格努斯这样的典范，并为达·芬奇和其他人的智力杂技奠定了基础。欧洲中世纪的七门文科，很像我们自己的，可能是博学多才的训练场，灌输纪律——来自拉丁语的“ disciplina”，用于指导或训练，但也是一个艺术术语，指小鞭子或鞭子，记忆-中世纪教室描绘中流行的酷刑形象。博学需要对身心进行艰苦且常常曲折的工作，但它所引发的对专业化的抵制可能会证明，至少对于某些它的指定者来说，它既是跨学科的，也是反学科的。

如何组织和协调在现代知识圈不断扩大的领域中进行的新的离心学习，在启蒙运动期间成为一个前所未有的问题。它是...