Content area
Full text
Edward Slingerland and Mark Collard, Eds. Creating Consilience: Integrating the Sciences and the Humanities. New York: Oxford UP, 2012. xv + 450pp.
In 2008, the University of British Columbia sponsored a workshop called "Integrating Science and the Humanities." Creating Consilience is the direct result of that workshop. This collection of essays, edited by Edward Slingerland, Canada Research Chair in Chinese Thought and Embodied Cognition, and Mark Collard, Canada Research Chair in Human Evolutionary Studies, brings together research from scholars from a range of disciplines, including philosophy, anthropology, bioethics, English, and evolutionary studies. It also includes essays with varying viewpoints on the project of consilience itself-an extension of interdisciplinarity across the sciences/humanities divide-addressing the project's potential, feasibility, limitations, and desirability. The workshop and this edited collection arose out of a simple but ambitious goal: the "attempt to develop a new, shared framework for the sciences and humanities" (4).
Part of the collection's purpose was to establish a "second wave" of consilience, one that, like the second wave of feminism, both grew out of and included the earlier wave but also pushed forward in new directions (23). The first wave of consilience was put forward in the work of John Tooby and Leda Cosmides and E. O. Wilson, and has faced two major challenges: the first, substantive, the second, stylistic. Substantively, the workshop tried to address how "issues such as the relationship between evolved human cognitive architecture and culture, or the status of science in the chain of explanation, needed to be treated in a more sophisticated fashion" (23). Stylistically, the humanists in the workshop, who are represented in the collection's essays, tried to shift"the rhetoric of proponents of consilience (most of them coming from the science side of the science/humanities divide) [that] often tended to sound dismissive of the value of traditional humanistic work" (23). These two shifts provide the theoretical and rhetorical basis that unifies the collection, with essays respecting "emergent levels of truth" (24), "recognizing the importance...