Edward Osborne Wilson

#2

At a time when the survival of our species and the rest of the living world is more than ever linked to our understanding of science, Pulitzer-Prize-winning biologist Edward O. Wilson has distilled sixty years of teaching into a book for students, both young and old alike. Throughout his storied career, Wilson has counseled thousands of talented young people, and as a result has gleaned a deep knowledge, indeed a philosophy, of what one needs to know to have a successful career in science. In Letters to a Young Scientist, he lays out not just his practical advice for how the next generation can succeed, but why it is so vitally important that they do. Wilson threads these twenty letters with richly illustrated autobiographical anecdotes that illuminate his career--both his successes and his failures--and his motivations for becoming a biologist. Beginning with his own coming-of-age in Mobile, Alabama, Wilson reflects on his adolescence as an enthusiastic Boy Scout, resolved to spend as much of his free time as possible outdoors, exploring the swamps and forests of the Gulf Coast and cataloging its many spiders, ants, snakes, and butterflies. Determined at first to reach the rank of Eagle Scout and then later to become an entomologist. Wilson describes an early passion tempered by education as being a guiding force in forging the arc of a career. Letters to a Young Scientist includes advice on choosing a field of study, finding a mentor, and the application of scientific theory in the real world. Yet Wilson insists that success in the sciences does not depend on mathematical skill or even a high IQ, but rather a passion for finding a problem and solving it. He calls more broadly for a synthesis of the sciences and humanities in the twenty-first century that can inspire a generation of young people, encourage their innate creativity, and set them to work solving the problems that previous generations have woefully ignored.

#3

In this short book, acclaimed writer and philosopher Roger Scruton presents an original and radical defense of human uniqueness. Confronting the views of evolutionary psychologists, utilitarian moralists, and philosophical materialists such as Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, Scruton argues that human beings cannot be understood simply as biological objects. We are not only human animals; we are also persons, in essential relation with other persons, and bound to them by obligations and rights. Our world is a shared world, exhibiting freedom, value, and accountability, and to understand it we must address other people face to face and I to I. Scruton develops and defends his account of human nature by ranging widely across intellectual history, from Plato and Averroes to Darwin and Wittgenstein. The book begins with Kant's suggestion that we are distinguished by our ability to say "I"--by our sense of ourselves as the centers of self-conscious reflection. This fact is manifested in our emotions, interests, and relations. It is the foundation of the moral sense, as well as of the aesthetic and religious conceptions through which we shape the human world and endow it with meaning. And it lies outside the scope of modern materialist philosophy, even though it is a natural and not a supernatural fact. Ultimately, Scruton offers a new way of understanding how self-consciousness affects the question of how we should live. The result is a rich view of human nature that challenges some of today's most fashionable ideas about our species.