What Science Offers the Humanities
Integrating Body & Culture
Cambridge University Press, 2008
This book examines some of the deep problems facing current approaches to the study of culture, focusing especially on the excesses of postmodernism, but also acknowledging the problems with Enlightenment objectivism. Slingerland argues that, for the humanities to progress, they need to move beyond the mind-body dualism upon which both postmodernism and objectivism are based.
Scientific discoveries about human cognition have an important constraining function to play in the humanities, calling into question such deeply entrenched dogmas as the “blank slate” theory of human nature, strong social constructivism, and the ideal of disembodied reason.
The goal of this book is to urge humanists to begin taking these discoveries seriously, and to thereby replace the traditional humanities–science divide with a vertically integrated approach to the study of culture. The result would be an embodied, empirically-responsible, pragmatic vision of human reality in all of its cultural and historical complexity.
The novelist Ian McEwan named What Science Offers the Humanities one of the five books that most influenced his novels, but fifteen years out it still punches rather below its weight…
“For years humanists have been heralding the end of the great age of Theory. But no one can agree on what comes next. Edward Slingerland knows what comes next: a turn toward science. No one with an interest in where the humanities have recently been, and where they will now be going, can afford to miss out on What Science Offers the Humanities.”
“Inquiry into what it means to be human has been hindered by an artificial separation of the humanities and science. Historically, adherence to this separation has been a minority position - one whose intellectual damage Slingerland shrewdly appraises and sets out to repair. This is an intelligent and timely project.”
“. . . intellectually acute, wide-ranging, well-written, and deeply knowledgeable survey of the hard and soft disciplines behind consciousness . . .”
“I greatly enjoyed and admired Slingerland’s What Science Offers the Humanities, and recommend it highly. It not only addresses a weariness and lack of curiosity at the heart of some major areas in the humanities, but is also very adept at summing up the best thinking in the natural sciences. It teems with ideas that will intrigue and delight an open mind, and is also lively and positive in its bridge building. Slingerland shows real intellectual brio. This is an important book.”
Additional Reviews
Science 322 (10 October 2008): 195-196 (H. Fromm)
“Quo vadis, humaniora?” (article discussion), Language and Literature (Keel ja Kirjandus) (August 09, 2008), 577-588 (M. Tamm) [in Estonian]
Isis 100 (March 2009): 211-212 (G.E.R. Lloyd)
Metapsychology online reviews 13.31 (July 28, 2009) (R. Harrington)
“Putnam, Dennett, and Others: Philosophical Resources for the World Historian” (article discussion), Journal of World History 20.4 (December 2009), 491-522 (J. Wills)
“The Educator Must Be Educated: The Study of Religion at the End of the Humanities” (article discussion), Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 22.1 (2010), 1-8 (M. Day)
Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature & Culture 222 4.3 (October 2010): 235-238 (N. Barrett)
The Heythrop Journal 52.2 (March 2011): 351-352 (B. McCall)
“The Humanities as Empirically Grounded Sciences,” Historical Methods 44.4 (Oct-Dec 2011): 165-170 (M. Schouten)
“Can the Two Cultures Reconcile? Reconstruction and Neuropragmatism” (article discussion), Handbook of Neurosociology (2013), 83-97 (T. Solymosi)