WHY DO WE NEED THE HUMANITIES? Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht calls for more team spirit and mind of our master storytellers. Only thus could be "no less than the question of survival for mankind" solved

Gumbrecht's ideas (...of science and humanities fusing for a greater scope of science) are nothing new. Such fusions have been around since the sciences have framed and made possible the global rise of Europe and the West. The Royal Society of England under Isaac Newton would be one example. The Berlin-Brandenburg Acadamy of Sciences and Humanities, created by Friedrich II., would be another. There is also the literary agent John Brockman who gives the thinkers who are in his view the world's brightest minds a question to respond to online in a strictly limited number of characters.