Leaving Us to Wonder: An Essay on the Questions Science Can't Ask

Contents

1 Contents Preface vii Chapter One: A Place to Begin 1 Curiosity and Wonder 1 A Place to Begin 3 Mistaking the Abstract for the Concrete 5 Today’s Popular Science 10 The Spirit of Socrates 17 Chapter Two: The Persistence of a Question 21 Some Background Questions 21 Kant and the Enlightenment 26 The Emergence of Evolutionary Theory 30 The Promotion of Human Sociobiology 33 Chapter Three: What Darwin and Nietzsche Saw 45 Some Background on Darwin and Nietzsche 45 Darwin’s Descent of Man: The Evolution of Morality 50 Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals: The Evolution of (A Different) Morality 56 Nietzsche’s Differences with Darwin 70 Chapter Four: Provoking Thought 77 Heidegger and the Distinction between Ways of Thinking 78 Merleau-Ponty and the Importance of Embodied Experience 87 Chapter Five: The Limits of Science and the Danger of Scientism: Drawing Out the Consequences for Thinking 101 Faces that Launched a Thousand Web Site Hits 105 A More Serious Concern 108 Chapter Six: Leaving Us to Wonder 117 The Difficulty Begins Here 117 Thinking Beyond and Otherwise 120 Turning to the Public Sphere 122 Desire for Public Dialogue 133 Leaving Us to Wonder 137 Notes 141 Bibliography 153 Index 161 vi Leaving Us to Wonder ...