Creating Consilience: Integrating the Sciences and the Humanities
Edward Slingerland and Mark Collard
Abstract
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 nonhuman 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 approa ... More
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 nonhuman 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. This book is the product of a workshop that brought together international scholars from a variety of fields to address both these issues. It includes representative work 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, studying 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 seeks to facilitate the creation of a new, shared framework for the sciences and humanities.
Keywords:
consilience,
vertical integration,
science,
humanities,
culture,
mind-body dualism,
human mind
Bibliographic Information
Print publication date: 2011 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780199794393 |
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2012 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199794393.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Edward Slingerland, editor
University of British Columbia
Mark Collard, editor
Simon Fraser University
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