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Stephen Jay Gould offers a surprising and nuanced study of the complex relationship between our two great ways of knowing: science and the humanities, twin realms of knowledge that have been divided against each other for far too long. To establish his two protagonists, Gould draws from a seventh century b.c. proverb attributed to the Greek soldier-poet Archilochus that said roughly, "The fox devises many strategies; the hedgehog knows one great and effective strategy." While emphatically rejecting any simplistic attempt to assign either science or the humanities to one or the other of these approaches to knowledge, Gould uses this ancient concept to demonstrate that neither strategy can work alone, but that these seeming opposites can be conjoined into a common enterprise of tremendous unity and power. In building his case, Gould shows why the common assumption of an inescapable conflict between science and the humanities (in which he includes religion) is false, mounts a spirited rebuttal to the ideas that his intellectual rival E. O. Wilson set forth in his book Consilience, and explains why the pursuit of knowledge must always operate upon the bedrock of nature's randomness. The hedgehog, the fox, and the magister's pox is a controversial discourse, rich with facts and observations gathered by one of the most erudite minds of our time.… (more)
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Also, while most of Gould's writing is very clear and eloquent, I found his prose here both somewhat overwritten and fairly dry, sometimes even bordering on the pretentious. I don't know how much of this is due to a conscious but misguided attempt to write in a style more common in the humanities than the sciences, and how much of it is due to the unfortunate fact that he died before getting the opportunity to edit and revise the text. But I do know that it contributed to the sense of disappointment I felt about the whole thing.
Ultimately, while some of it is interesting, I have to say that if you're going to skip reading just one of Stephen Jay Gould's books, this should be it.
But then his tone and direction change, and he reveals the work as a rebuttal of E.O. Wilson's idea of 'Consilience', which, in Wilson's usage, seeks to unite science and the humanities by the assumption that the humanities will be explainable by basic science, i.e. physics. Gould equates this with reductionism, the doctrine that all complex problems and organizations can be understood from the component scientific parts, which works moderately well until synergies produce surprising results.
Gould further attempts to refute Wilson by comparison to the work of the man who originally coined the word consilience, William Whewell, almost 200 years ago. In Whewell's terminology, the word refers to that flash of insight (jumping together) that can happen by the process of inductive reasoning, and definitely does not apply to ethics or morality, etc.
It's a complicated and often repetitive argument, weakened (I think) by Whewell's bias as an Episcopal clergyman at Oxford. We who read his protestations now might conclude that he had some bias in his declaration.
Ultimately, Gould pleads for the independence of ethics and morals, rather than their derived reduction from physics and biology. So this is the conflict between science and the humanities that Gould analyzes, shows us by example, insists is not a real conflict because they cannot cover the same ground.
It feels a little too insistent to me. But the discussion did bring to mind several much lighter books, science fiction in which the human psychology is so well understood that it can be physically manipulated (was that in the Dune series? or Asimov?). And it also brought to mind many recent experiments involving MRI evidence that are beginning to show us how we think, where we think, and maybe why we think some of the things we do. I would hate to think Wilson was correct in the most grandiose sense, but we may be at the cusp of a new understanding, at the cellular level, of just those ethics and morality Gould feels cannot be scientifically explained.
I warn the reader that Gould can write incredibly long and complex sentences, occasionally lengthened by parenthetical remarks of a sometimes personal nature. However, if you are interested in the history and philosophy of science, it might be to your liking.
This is the last book he wrote before he died and indeed he did not finish editing it in to shape. It is a book discussing the perceived gap between science and the humanities
Gould is a good writer but this is both unfinished and rather a change of subject and certainly much drier and less interesting than his scientific writing.
I did enjoy it none the less and found the details of religious censorship fascinating.
So I'm not telling you to avoid it - just to be aware of just what this book is before you buy it.
The first part of the book explores the divide between the two disciplines, when it started and why, and if there is really a divide between them.
The last part of the book is all written in the form of a critique of his collegue Wilson. He digs out the origin of the term consilience, that he says Wilson uses improperly. He discusses of reductionism. He describes how reductionism is not applicaple to humanities, and not even to science. Emergent proprierties and contingency are in the way of reductionistic approaches.
The end left me with something missing. He never really address how humanities and science can cooperate. He just says they have to cooperate, each one with its own methods.
He also claims that ethics cannot be studied with empirical methods, since ethics is far too removed from empirical things both in term of distance from empirical things and in terms of historic distance. When ethics arose as part of evolution it probably had a sense, but today the society evolved too far to find and evolutional meaning to ethics. This reasoning didn't really convinced me.
I also found his style of writing a little bit too arrogant and complacent.
Overall the book is interesting to read, and some issues are interesting to read, but I wasn't taken by his approach to the main issue of the book.