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Loading... Consilience: The Unity of Knowledgeby Edward O. Wilson
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. A highly philosophical book about the unity of all things- how physics at the most basic sense gives rise to chemistry which results in life and at the most general level, art and emotion. Wilson can be a bit boring at times, philosophizing for pages and pages, but overall it is a very good book. develynlibrary | Dec 17, 2008 |   EO Wilson argues that social sciences and humanities should work towards consilience with natural sciences. I agree totally with this point of view, but I do not find his version very new or informed. From a philosophical viewpoint it is a bit 'pedestrian', reductionist, rather than materialistic. Reading the last chapter, you get the suspicion that the whole book is really a ecologically minded biologist, who wants to debunk economical theory. (  )sharder | Sep 22, 2008 | I have just recently re-read this book and this time around I appreciate Mr. Wilson's thoroughly logical attempts to make sense of our increasingly illogical world. I was especially interested in his ideas about Postmodernism--and it's belief that we each have a separate unique reality--destroying the ability of art to connect people to larger, inately human, archetypes. To me, this would explain the world gone mad on religion: we are searching for archetypes. (  )Ibreak4books | Sep 9, 2007 | 1  The enlightenment reborn! Literately written and persuasively argued, the author informs you why science is the best way to explain everything, from the natural sciences (where it's doing just fine), to the social sciences, arts and humanities, and finally to morality and religion. Reduction and synthesis both abound in this epistemologically monistic vision of the world. ( )mkjones | May 21, 2007 | Consilience was a great read I thought. Wilson gives a brief account of the history of consiliatory thought and then begins taking each area of the humanities head on. In dicussing recent movements and ideas and biology, Wilson sketches out what we know about the mind and how he sees biology linking together with higher social phenomena in the long-run. In doing so all topics are approached, from economics and art to religion and literature. Wilson closes the book with a plea to end petty squabbling between sciences and humanities and to put the culture wars away in order to solve the more important problems of the day. His last chapter outlines the global warming crisis (as of 1998) and makes a call for all sides to come together in order to save "The Creation" as he refers to it. Wilson's prose is elegant and moving at times and his explanations and metaphors are apt. ( )Yiggy | Jan 5, 2007 | 1 0.058 seconds to build listing  no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com (ISBN 067976867X, Paperback)The biologist Edward O. Wilson is a rare scientist: having over a long career made signal contributions to population genetics, evolutionary biology, entomology, and ethology, he has also steeped himself in philosophy, the humanities, and the social sciences. The result of his lifelong, wide-ranging investigations is Consilience (the word means "a jumping together," in this case of the many branches of human knowledge), a wonderfully broad study that encourages scholars to bridge the many gaps that yawn between and within the cultures of science and the arts. No such gaps should exist, Wilson maintains, for the sciences, humanities, and arts have a common goal: to give understanding a purpose, to lend to us all "a conviction, far deeper than a mere working proposition, that the world is orderly and can be explained by a small number of natural laws." In making his synthetic argument, Wilson examines the ways (rightly and wrongly) in which science is done, puzzles over the postmodernist debates now sweeping academia, and proposes thought-provoking ideas about religion and human nature. He turns to the great evolutionary biologists and the scholars of the Enlightenment for case studies of science properly conducted, considers the life cycles of ants and mountain lions, and presses, again and again, for rigor and vigor to be brought to bear on our search for meaning. The time is right, he suggests, for us to understand more fully that quest for knowledge, for "Homo sapiens, the first truly free species, is about to decommission natural selection, the force that made us.... Soon we must look deep within ourselves and decide what we wish to become." Wilson's wisdom, eloquently expressed in the pages of this grand and lively summing-up, will be of much help in that search.(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:03 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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