Alan G. Gross

The sublime evokes our awe, our terror, and our wonder. Applied first in ancient Greece to the heights of literary expression, in the 18th-century the sublime was extended to nature and to the sciences, enterprises that viewed the natural world as a manifestation of God's goodness, power, and wisdom. In The Scientific Sublime, Alan Gross reveals the modern-day sublime in popular science. He shows how the great popular scientists of our time--Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, Steven Weinberg, Brian Greene, Lisa Randall, Rachel Carson, Stephen Jay Gould, Steven Pinker, Richard Dawkins, and E. O. Wilson--evoke the sublime in response to fundamental questions: How did the universe begin? How did life? How did language? These authors maintain a tradition initiated by Joseph Addison, Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant, and Adam Smith, towering 18th-century figures who adapted the literary sublime first to nature, then to science--though with one crucial difference: religion has been replaced wholly by science. In a final chapter, Gross explores science's attack on religion, an assault that attempts to sweep permanently under the rug two questions science cannot answer: What is the meaning of life? What is the meaning of the good life?

Although generally informed by an intimate knowledge of evolutionary biology and taxonomy, the controversy over the nature of species is clearly philosophical; it consists almost entirely of the clarification of old, and the invention of new arguments for or against calling the species category a class, The debate seems firmly divided between those, like Kitts and Bernier, who see homo sapiens as a class, and those, like Hull and Ghiselin, who see it as an individual. In the first case, particular human beings are members; in the second case, parts. To the champions of class, the essentialists, each species can be defined by means of a unique set of necessary and sufficient conditions, and every organism can be placed without equivocation into a particular species. To the individualists, nothing could be further from the truth. As a contingent, product of evolution, each species shares that crucial characteristic of an individual, spacio-temporal identity; each is a chunk of genealogical nexus.

In a recent paper (1989), Ian Hacking has extended his discussion of entity realism, a discussion begun six years ago in the final chapter of Representing and Intervening (1983). This extension allows us to examine for the first time the whole of one impressive attempt to rescue scientific realism from the ever more subtle skepticism of post-positivist thinking (Laudan 1984; Fine 1986). Hacking’s approach complements that of Nancy Cartwright. Like Cartwright, he implies that a full-blown realism about scientific theories and entities can survive neither the facts of history nor the arguments of opponents. Hacking is a realist only about some unobservable entities, those he thinks durable enough to survive most alterations in theory. This is the science that Kuhn said survived even paradigm change.Electrons are Hacking’s example of a real unobservable entity. Their behavior is so consistent and so well-known that they are used as tools: they are manipulated in the engineering of scientific experiments designed to extend the bounds of the known.

This accessible book examines the philosophical foundations of Chaim Perelman's rhetorical theory. In addition to offering a brief biography, it explores Perelman's deep philosophical commitments and his concern for the ways in which the details of actual texts realize those commitments. The authors show that Perelman still reigns supreme when it comes to the elucidation of actual texts. His is a microanalysis of arguments, one that is endlessly suggestive of ways of analyzing texts at the level of the word and phrase, the arrangement of parts, and the structure of arguments. Book jacket.