From: Damien Broderick (damienb@unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Sun Aug 31 2003 - 21:36:40 MDT
I don't suppose anyone here has yet read Stephen Jay Gould's final
postmortem book THE HEDGEHOG, THE FOX, AND THE MAGISTER'S POX? The long
closing chapter is an attempted assault on Ed Wilson's allegedly
reductionist account of consilience--the goal of unity between all
disciplines--in familiar Gouldian skeptical terms that invoke the veiling
force of emergence and contingency, in the overarching context of his
suggested principle of NOMA (Non-Overlapping Magisteria, or teaching
authorities, that include the sciences, the humanities, religion/ethics,
aesthetics, and perhaps others unspecified, possibly including baseball.
That last was a joke. I think). I strongly suspect NOMA is a cop-out. (And
I can't even work out why it isn't NOM, unless his original formulation was
Non-Overlapping Magisterial Authorities.) I'd be interesting in hearing
opinions on the book.
Damien Broderick
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