Notes on: Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge : Edward O. Wilson

Working through this book again and I thought I'd use this as a space to capture what I think are some of the most salient points from this really important book. Please feel free to chime in with you thoughts, comments, suggestions. 

Chapter 1: The Ionian Enchantment

•  Einstein writing to Marcel Grossman "It is a wonderful feeling to recognize the unity of a complex of phenomena that to direct obeservation appear to be quite separate things" p5
•  "The first step to wisdom, as the Chinese say, is getting things by their right names."p4

Chapter 2: The Great Branches of Learning

•  Science is.."driven by the faith that if we dream, press to discover, explain, and dream again, thereby plunging repeatedly into new terrain, the world will somehow come clearer and we will grasp the true strangeness of the Universe. And the strangeness will all prove to be connected and make sense." p12
•  "We are approaching a new age of synthesis, when the testing of consilience is the greatest of all intellectual challenges" p12
• Sherrington...the brain as "enchanted loom" ..."weaving a picture of the extrernal world, tearing down and reweaving, inventing other worlds, creating a miniature universe"P13
• "while the average number of undergraduate courses per institution doubled, the percentage of mandatory courses in general education dropped by more than half.." p.13
• "Every college student should be able to answer the following question: What is the relation between science and the humanities and how is it important for human welfare?" p.13

Chapter 3: The Enlightenment

• p. 16 - Rousseau and the idea of "general will" used by Robespierre as justification for the Reign of Terror
• "savage coercion" p.17
• the story of  Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet
• the "dark-angelic flaw" of the Enlightenment
• describes the Enlightenment as "a lacework of deltaic streams working their way along twisted channels"p.23
• "but what counts most in the long haul of history is seminality not sentiment" p.24
• Francis Bacon as the Enlightenment thinker who's spirit "most endures" p.24
• Bacon observed that "the mind, hastily and without choice, imbibes and treasures up the first notices of things, from whence all the rest proceed, errors must forever prevail, and remain uncorrected" ....thus knowledge is not well constructed but "resembles a magnificient structure that has no foundation" p.25
• the "buccinator novi temporis" ...Trumpeter of New Times p.25
• "The repeated testing of knowledge by experiment, he [Bacon] insisted, is the cutting edge of learning" p.28
• Bacon as "Father of Induction" p28
• "...Bacon advised us to use aphorisms, illustrations, stories, fables, analogies-anything that conveys truth from the discoverer to the readers as clearly as a picture." p29
• Bacon's "Idols of the Mind" (tribe, marketplace, theater) p29
• "Descartes' overarching vision was one of knowledge as a system of intercoonected truths that can be ultimately abstracted into mathematics" p31
• "Descartes insisted upon systemiatic doubt as the first principle of learning"p31
• "He allowed himself only one undeniable premise, captured in his celebrated phrase 'Cogito Ergo Sum'...." p31
• "The cost of scientific advance is the humbling recognition that reality was not constructed to be easily grasped by the human mind......Our species and its ways of thinking are a product of evolution, not the purpose of evolution." p34
• dual sword of Enlightenment thought could free mankind or enslave it
• Romantic backlash "If the constraining universe of matter and energy cannot be denied, at least it can be ignored with splendid contempt." p38
• "Rousseau, while often listed as an Enlightenment philosophe, was really the founder and most extreme visionary of the Romantic philosophical movement....For him, learning and social order are the enemies of humanity." p38
• "His [Rousseau] utopia is a minimalist state in which people abandon books and other accoutrements of intellect in order to cultivate enjoyment of the senses and good health." p38
• "In America, German philosophical Romanticism was mirrored in New England transcendentalism...." p39