It was such an outlook which no doubt had something to do with our decision taken ten years ago here in Grenoble to give concrete shape to a utopian dream by creating in our city a “school for peace”. If everything is not permissible, at least everything seems possible! If, ever since the humanism of the Renaissance period, we have been happy to lay claim to the wisdom of one of its great writers, Rabelais, who taught a moral lesson to the young Pantagruel with the neat formula “science without conscience is the ruin of the soul”, we nonetheless stand in awe before modern scientific advances and the extraordinary achievements that they have opened up. The search for truth which is the essential dimension of the construction of a peaceful world therefore has to navigate between considerations of a philosophical nature and the concrete data of the hard sciences. The so-called “hard” or “exact” sciences, with their necessary emphasis on technology and on the technical, are hardly reputed for being very human, and, conversely, the so-called “human” sciences are often pronounced as “soft” because they cannot be based on the certainties associated with the former.
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