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The Meaning Of Human Existence (2014)

by Edward O. Wilson(Favorite Author)

3.8 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

0871401002 (ISBN13: 9780871401007)

languge

English

genre

Nonfiction

publisher

Liveright Publishing Corporation

review 1: I haven't read anything by Wilson before and, frankly, given his reputation as a thinker, I was disappointed. He gave about two pages to the problem of meaning, then went on to simply ramble for the next 170 pages. His ramblings are sometimes interesting and even enlightening, but lI have no idea what he was doing on the whole. Maybe I will read one of his earlier books some day. Hope they are more coherent.
review 2: Reads like what it is: the musings of an elderly Harvard professor at liberty to say whatever he likes. I don't disagree with anything he writes here, but neither do I find any of it new or revelatory. Also, it's very easy to critique things like the way top tier universities breed hyper-specialization and mediocre teaching when he has profite... mored so extensively from that very system. Sometimes, his rants are amusing, in a curmudgeonly way as in this regarding the hesitancy among the scientific community to broadly denounce religious anti-science nut jobbery: "Scientists who might contribute to a more realistic worldview are especially disappointing. Largely yeomen, they are intellectual dwarves content to stay within the narrow specialities for which they were trained and are paid." He does make the true but not new argument for a synthesis of the humanities and the sciences, but there are a whole lot of us who already knew that. Also, a minor point, but amusing. Wilson seems to feel the need to define words like abdomen for his readership, but not less familiar ones like phylogeny? I struggle to think who the target audience for this book actually might be. less

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