Creating Consilience: Integrating the Sciences and the Humanities

Description

Calls for a consilient or vertically integrated approach to the study of human mind and culture have, for the most part, been received by scholars in the humanities with either indifference or hostility. One reason for this is that consilience has often been framed as bringing the study of humanistic issues into line with the study of non-human phenomena, rather than as something to which humanists and scientists contribute equally. The other major reason that consilience has yet to catch on in the humanities is a dearth of compelling examples of the benefits of adopting a consilient approach. Creating Consilience is the product of a workshop that brought together internationally-renowned scholars from a variety of fields to address both of these issues. It includes representative pieces from workshop speakers and participants that examine how adopting such a consilient stance -- informed by cognitive science and grounded in evolutionary theory -- would concretely impact specific topics in the humanities, examining each topic in a manner that not only cuts across the humanities-natural science divide, but also across individual humanistic disciplines. By taking seriously the fact that science-humanities integration is a two-way exchange, this volume takes a new approach to bridging the cultures of science and the humanities. The editors and contributors formulate how to develop a new shared framework of consilience beyond mere interdisciplinarity, in a way that both sides can accept. Cover Contents Acknowledgements Contributor Notes Introduction : Creating Consilience: Toward a Second Wave Part I: Theoretical Issues Section One: Ontologies for the Human 1. The Humanities and Human Nature 2. The Metaphysical Realities of the Unphysical Sciences: Or Why Vertical Integration Seems Unrealistic to Ontological Pluralists 3. Mind-Body Dualism and the Two Cultures 4. On the Psychological Origins of Dualism: Dual-Process Cognition and the Explanatory Gap Section Two: Consilience Through the Lens of Anthropology 5. From Studious Irrelevancy to Consilient Knowledge: Modes of Scholarship and Cultural Anthropology 6. Whence and Whither Sociocultural Anthropology 7. Unconsilience: Rethinking the Two-Cultures Conundrum in Anthropology Part II: Case Studies Section Three: Culture 8. Culture in Songbirds and Its Contribution to the Evolution of New Species 9. When Does Psychology Drive Culture? 10. Quantifying the Importance of Motifs on Attic Figure-Painted Pottery 11. Agents, Intelligence, and Social Atoms Section Four: Religion 12. Evolutionary Religious Studies: A Beginner’s Guide 13. The Cultural Evolution of Religion 14. The Importance of Being “Ernest” Section Five: Morality 15. We’re All Connected: Science, Ethics, and the Law 16. The Evolution of a Sense of Morality 17. Behavioral Ethics 18. Interdisciplinary Education and Knowledge Translation Programs in Neuroethics Section Six: Literature and Oral Traditions 19. “ Once the Child is Lost He Dies ”: Monster Stories vis-a-vis the Problem of Errant Children 20. “By Weapons Made Worthy”: A Darwinian Perspective on Beowulf 21. Palaeolithic Politics in British Novels of the Nineteenth Century 22. Language, Cognition, and Literature Afterword: Two Points about Two Cultures Appendix: “Integrating Science and the Humanities” Index A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z