But he said …' (We see Wittgenstein his arms waving excitedly over his head), 'God prevent me from sanity,' to which Russell responds in a cloud-like thought bubble - a pipe hanging languidly from his mouth, 'God certainly will!' I warned him that he should beware: the way he was driving himself he could well go insane. one night in extreme agony about some fine logical point.

We watch as Wittgenstein butts heads with Russell over the central question of 'the independent existence of a mathematical reality.' In narrative boxes on a single panel, we read: 'Wittgenstein barged into my rooms at 3 a.m. Moore, Georg Cantor, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Jules Poincaré, John Von Neumann, Alfred North Whitehead, Kurt Gödel and, most especially, Bertrand Russell march through its pages making complex arguments and living outsized, even heroic, lives at the centre of the great debates and events of the 20th century. Giants such as Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege, G.E. Here we find a veritable murderers' row of philosophical and scientific inquirers and inquiry (in that sense, I posit math in her rightful place as the queen of the sciences). Which hasn't prevented some in the sciences from arguing precisely the opposite, from assuming even this last, most ill-fitting mantle, by suggesting that science's spirit of questioning will automatically infect the rest of society.'

They have no aptitude for it, no connection to it, really. And one of the things they don't do well is democracy. 'It troubles me because there are many things 'math and science' do well, and some they don't.

… The sciences march, largely untouched, under the banner of the inherently good. That said, I see no contradiction between my respect for science and my humanist's discomfort with its ever-greater role in American culture. 'Let me be clear,' Slouka writes in a careful effort to side with the angels, 'I write this not to provide tinder to our latter-day inquisitors, ever eager to sacrifice the spirit of scientific inquiry in the name of some new misapprehension.

The September issue of Harper's magazine features a piece by Mark Slouka lamenting the demise of the humanities in favour of math and science.

Logicomix by Apostolos Doxiadis