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Title: The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister's Pox: Mending the Gap Between Science and the Humanities by Stephen Jay Gould ISBN: 0-609-60140-7 Publisher: Harmony Pub. Date: 08 April, 2003 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $25.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 2.8 (5 reviews)
Rating: 1
Summary: Gould's Last Hurrah
Comment: I'm not sure just where to start with this review. Let's try this - The Hedgehog, the Fox and the Magister's Pox is the most egotistical, self centered, pedantic, ostentatious, pontifical book I have ever managed to gag down. There. How's that for a start? As to style, Gould forsakes his usual clear and beautiful prose for a wordy, redundant, repetitive monologue, and besides that he keeps saying the same thing over and over again and repeats himself a lot, if you see what I mean. He's dense in spots, but I don't necessarily fault him for that. Sometimes, constructing a logic on a difficult topic simply results in dense prose, and the reader has to pay attention.
As to content, the first thing that impressed me was the number of obscure original medieval texts on science and philosophy that Gould has acquired. That was Gould's intention, as far as I can tell. Gould seems to be very impressed with his library, and wants you to be too. Every single time that he uses an example from his collection, and there are lots of them, he is careful to point out that it was translated from his book. Great. I'm a bibliophile too, and I'd love to own some of those volumes, but I'd like to think I'd be a little more humble about it. Who knows - maybe I wouldn't be. He has also taken the time and trouble to learn Latin, and medieval writing conventions, which are not simple. Good on you, Stevie boy. I have to admit it - I've been lazy, having forgotten most of the Latin I learned as an alter boy, and I haven't had the self-discipline to actually learn the language properly. Gould is counting on that apparently. Every time he offers us a bit of Latin, he is careful to point out that he did the translation. Again, a little humility would go a long way. But he is also careful to add plenty of Latin phrases untranslated. I'm not sure what the message here is - perhaps it's I know Latin and you don't? Or maybe it's I've written a lot of popular texts, and this one is for the intelligentsia? More likely, if I had to guess, the message is E.O. Wilson doesn't read Latin and I'm a Renaissance man and he's not.
Ostensibly, the book is about the limits of reductionist thinking, its role in the humanities, and a contrast of Gould's and Wilson's views on the topic. Gould rambles, three sheets to the wind for 150 or so pages of flotsam, and every time you think he's going to heel her over and dip a rail in the water, he luffs. But, when he finally beaches himself on the mainland of his thesis, he goes after it with a vengeance. Or maybe I should say a vendetta. Wilson started the whole thing with his book Consilience. If you haven't read it, it's not bad, but I am rather inclined agree with Gould that Wilson kind of goes off the deep end towards the end of his book. Wilson seems to think that in the not too distant future science will be able to derive True Love and the Meaning of Meaning from first principals. I doubt it, but that's OK. He's an old man, he's done a lot, and if he wants to write stuff like this at his age he's entitled, and I think we should have the good grace to humor him, at least until he's dead. Then we can pick on him.
Although Gould presents this book as a standard scholarly discourse, it seems to me that the truth of the matter is that this book was written solely because Steve doesn't like Ed very much to start with, and besides that, Dr. Wilson stole Dr. Gould's favorite obscure word. Consilience. That pissed Gould off big time. He's not shy about telling you how mad he is about it either. And, adding injury to insult, Gould feels like Wilson misused the word by extending its meaning beyond it original rigorously defined domain. Gould goes to great lengths to make this case. Now I'm not as smart as Gould, but I am smart enough not to argue bananas with a 500-pound gorilla, and if Gould says he researched the history, and this is the way it is, well then, that's good enough for me, by golly. But English is nothing if not flexible, and I don't think that Wilson really deserves the hiding Gould gives him for stretching consilience a bit. It's a good and useful word, and when it is finally incorporated into our lexicon, I'll bet we use a definition closer to Wilson than Gould and Whewell.
Gould writes paragraph after paragraph about how he really kind of likes 'ol Ed, and this diatribe shouldn't be mistaken as a fit of pique. OK by me Steve, but me thinks the lady doth protest too loudly (no, I don't own the original, but I did do the translation myself.)
All in all, if the topic interests you, it has been hashed and rehashed for the last 3,000 years by the boys over in the philosophy department, and neither Gould nor Wilson offers us any new insights. However, if you wanted to, you could argue the main propositions of both sides by yourself tomorrow morning while you're sitting on the throne having a smoke and a cup of coffee. If you present the cases clearly, and don't get too hung up on the semantics, you should be able to hit all of the salient points and still have time for the comics.
Rating: 4
Summary: Mating a fox and a hedgehog.
Comment: E. O. Wilson observed in his classic book, CONSILIENCE (Knopf, 1998, p. 2), "the greatest enterprise of the mind has always been and always will be the attempted linkage of the sciences and the humanties." Although he ultimately rejects Wilson's path toward this end, it is this same enterprise paleontologist, Stephen Jay Gould undertakes in his final book, THE HEDGEHOG, THE FOX, AND THE MAGISTER'S POX.
Employing the fox and the hedgehog as symbols of the "cunning" of science and the "persistence" of the humanities (p. 2), Gould debunks the perceived dichotomy between the two disciplines. Drawing from the Renaissance and Scientific Revolution, the false dichotomy between science and the humantities, Gould argues, "probably lies deep within our neurological wiring as an evolved property of mental functioning, once adaptive in distant ancestors with far more limited brain power, but now inhereited as cognitive baggage" (p. 107). For Gould, the humanities and religion are not inferior to science. Rather, he takes a more "integral approach" to find the common ground shared by the two two disciplines (to borrow a phrase from Ken Wilber). "The wonderful and illuminating differences between the sciences and the humanities," he asserts, all serve in the potential service of one wisdom (p. 265). Along the way, it is a truly fascinating spectacle to watch Gould in his attempts to mate a fox and a hedgehog.
G. Merritt
Rating: 4
Summary: A book every true scientist should read!
Comment: Truly enjoy the book, a passionate humanistic scientist in action! However, I do have some problems about the logic and arguments of the book:
1. Gould contributes the initial contention between science and the humanities to the turf battle and the power struggle between the Renaissance humanism and the rise of modern science, more specifically, to the Modern vs. Ancient debate in the 17th & 18th centuries. I suspect the historical accuracy of such analysis and doubt that it has any significant impact on the contention today. Maybe Gould himself commits to a fictional dichotomy which he argues against all along.
2. It seems to me that there is a significant inconsistency between chapter 5 in which he reveals the fallacious and fictional dichotomies between science and the humanities and chapter 6 in which he admits of the real tension between scientism and the critic of scientism (see pp. 113-115). It confirms my impression that "science wars" are for real and should be taken seriously, not just extremists' paranoid illusions.
3. What bothers me the most is an apparent paradox between Gould's fundamental assumption of the epistemic status of science (a magisterium about fact or IS) and the humanities (a magisterium about value or OUGHT) on the one hand and his relentless call for integration of these two "non-overlapping magisterial" (in brief, NOMA) as his overarching goal of the book on the other. First of all, if science and the humanities belong to two non-overlapping domains of discussion with logically totally different aims, methods and objects, then how could they be integrated since there is no any commonality between them??? Gould did try to answer this charge in chapter 8 in terms of a metaphor "one from many," but without any success in my humble judgment. Secondly, I believe that the above paradox is due to Gould's beloved separationism between science and the humanities (religion included), i.e., his thesis of NOMA as he defended fiercely in his Rocks of Ages. Ironically, it is the same Gould -- who warns us to guard against any dichotomous oppositions between science and the humanities throughout the book -- who introduces a more dangerous dichotomy between fact and value through the backdoor. As anyone who are familiar with the recent development of Science Studies and comparative studies of science and religion (all start from Thomas Kuhn) already knows, there is no such sharp distinction between fact and value. As Gould himself has admitted from time to time when he dismisses the myth of objectivity (p. 116ff), science is heavily value-laden. So besides the myth of objectivity of science, Gould has to give up his myth of fact/value dichotomy too! Otherwise his "divine" goal of integration between science and the humanities is doomed.
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Title: I Have Landed: The End of a Beginning in Natural History by Stephen Jay Gould ISBN: 1400048044 Publisher: Three Rivers Press (CA) Pub. Date: 22 April, 2003 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
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Title: The Lying Stones of Marrakech: Penultimate Reflections in Natural History by Stephen Jay Gould ISBN: 0609807552 Publisher: Three Rivers Press (CA) Pub. Date: 17 April, 2001 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms: Essays on Natural History by Stephen Jay Gould ISBN: 0609804758 Publisher: Three Rivers Press (CA) Pub. Date: 01 November, 1999 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life by Stephen Jay Gould ISBN: 034545040X Publisher: Ballantine Books Pub. Date: 26 February, 2002 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: The Structure of Evolutionary Theory by Stephen Jay Gould ISBN: 0674006135 Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr Pub. Date: March, 2002 List Price(USD): $45.00 |
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