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Creating Consilience – Integrating the Sciences and the Humanities - Oxford Scholarship Online
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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

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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Contents

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Front Matter

Title Pages

Acknowledgements

Contributor Notes

Introduction

Edward Slingerland and Mark Collard

Part I Theoretical Issues

Section One Ontologies for the Human

1 The Humanities and Human Nature1

Steven Pinker

2 The Metaphysical Realities of the Unphysical Sciences: Or Why Vertical Integration Seems Unrealistic to Ontological Pluralists1

Richard A. Shweder

3 Mind-Body Dualism and the Two Cultures

Edward Slingerland

4 On the Psychological Origins of Dualism: Dual-Process Cognition and the Explanatory Gap*

Brian Fiala, Adam Arico, Shaun Nichols

Section Two Consilience through the Lens of Anthropology

5 From Studious Irrelevancy to Consilient Knowledge: Modes of Scholarship and Cultural Anthropology1

Pascal Boyer

6 Whence and Whither Sociocultural Anthropology

Harvey Whitehouse

7 Unconsilience: Rethinking the Two-Cultures Conundrum in Anthropology

Bradd Shore

Part II Case Studies

Section Three Culture

8 Culture in Songbirds and Its Contribution to the Evolution of New Species

Darren E. Irwin

9 When Does Psychology Drive Culture?

Olivier Morin

10 Quantifying the Importance of Motifs on Attic Figure-Painted Pottery

Peter Schauer

11 Agents, Intelligence, and Social Atoms

Alex Bentley and Paul Ormerod

Section Four Religion

12 Evolutionary Religious Studies: A Beginner's Guide

David Sloan Wilson and William Scott Green 1

13 The Cultural Evolution of Religion

Ara Norenzayan and Will M. Gervais

14 The Importance of Being “Ernest”

Robert N. McCauley

Section Five Morality

15 We’re All Connected: Science, Ethics, and the Law

Stephen Stich

16 The Evolution of a Sense of Morality

Dennis L. Krebs

17 Behavioral Ethics

Herbert Gintis

18 Interdisciplinary Education and Knowledge Translation Programs in Neuroethics

Daniel Buchman , Sofia Lombera, Ranga Venkatachary,Kate Tairyan, Judy Illes *

Section Six Literature and Oral Traditions

19 “ Once the Child is Lost He Dies ”: Monster Stories vis-a-vis the Problem of Errant Children

Michelle Scalise Sugiyama and Lawrence S. Sugiyama

20 “By Weapons Made Worthy”: A Darwinian Perspective on Beowulf

Raymond Corbey and Angus Mol

21 Palaeolithic Politics in British Novels of the Nineteenth Century

Joseph Carroll, Jonathan Gottschall, John A. Johnson, and Daniel Kruger

22 Language, Cognition, and Literature

Barbara Dancygier

Afterword

Geoffrey Galt Harpham

End Matter

Appendix “Integrating Science and the Humanities”

Index