on Literature & Science, pt. 5

Interviews with experts on connection between science and the humanities. Part 5.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• BRIAN BOYD
• DAVID SLOAN WILSON
• EVOLUTION
• HUMANITIES
• LITERARY DARWINISM

[aaronhemeon]

Notice how one of the most important intellectuals of your generation had a significant straightforward criticism of getting bridge laws between books and brains. Psychology makes much of the "normal" subject, the acculturated individual. Hooking readers up to fmri or gaining consensus through questionnaires will establish some hermeneutic trends. I, for my part, hope people never run out of new ways to read hamlet. A synonym for normal is common Getting a reading right won't produce genius

[mayalessov]

I agree, but I think the argument is: hey, if there are regularities, why not find out about them? The scholars do talk about the criticism that the scientific method will kill the beauty and the mystery. What do you think scientific inquiry into literature would damage directly?

[mayalessov]

by googling "Integrating Science and Humanities." These same scholars presented there and video of the talks is available online. Thanks for writing in. EP is not a bad place to be, even for exploring literature. I am excited about what Brian Boyd has been doing. He holds on to the text very tightly, despite his broad evolutionary view.

[jalgjalg]

Thank you for posting this!

I left literary studies because of all the mumbo jumbo and became an evolutionary psychologist... but these interviews inspire me to reconsider literature after not paying any attention to it for 4 years and maybe combine it with my new expertise in EP.

When and where were these recorded?

[mayalessov]

The Brian Boyd, Jonathon Gottschall and D.S. Wilson and Edward Slingerland ( everyone except Joe Carroll) were recorded Sept. 2008, at a conference put on by Prof. Slingerland in Vancouver BC. You can find the site by googleing

[aaronhemeon]

I don't think it will damage anything; I think this is an old quarrel in the journals that gets brought up and kicked around from time to time. If you string together Kuhn, Goodman, Cartwright, et all., you stop thinking of science as something on firmer ground. Once you see, as Rorty put it, Aristotle, Galileo, Newton, and Einstein as poets with incommensurable poems, you just hope that the next great thinker will draw an even bigger Emersonian circle around her predecessors.