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Beyond Representation: Deliberate Reading in a Panarchic World

Laura Dassow Walls explores how 'deliberative' reading practices may allow us to weigh the words we hear against the world we cognize - keeping alive the possibility of reading as a moral act.

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Laura Dassow Walls’ call for ‘deliberative’ reading practices echo her earlier critique of E.O. Wilson’s notion of ‘consilience’. Here Walls argues, Wilson’s attempt to forge an alliance between the sciences and the humanities fails because “Wilson writes as a scientist, imbuing every page with the sublime authority that allows him to mangle history without penalty and dismiss his opponents without argument.”

‐ Stefanie Boese

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Bruce Clarke’s review of Joseph Carroll’s Literary Darwinism similarly challenges the Neo Darwinists’ supposed scientific objectivity. Their project can only fail to see beyond the category of the human precisely because the circularity of their argument presupposes that which it seeks to analyze: “the only scientific observers of ‘human nature’ available are themselves human beings.”

‐ Stefanie Boese

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