January 2000

The essays listed below (some are abstracted) have been accepted for publication in our inaugural issue. To encourage a dialogue between the sciences and humanities, we'd like to publish, in future issues, responses to these essays that, from another perspective, directly engage their arguments and critiques. If you are interested in writing such a response, please contact us and provide the essay title and a statement of your interest and expertise in the subject (CVs welcome). We can provide paper or electronic copies of the essay.

We especially encourage responses from scientists whose disciplines are under scrutiny. No prior knowledge of the scholarly material at hand is expected, and you are free to engage any aspect of the essay. Specific, critical thinking that agrees, disagrees, or otherwise directly confronts the essay at hand will be the most useful to our wide audience.

Responses may range between four and ten double-spaced, typewritten pages. Full submission details.

• Science Tells Us...: Ontology, Ideology, and Narrative in Science Writing
  How should this culture resolve the problem of the meaning and proper scope of science? The role that science writing plays in contemporary knowledge-making is central to this question. Much science reporting, which mediates between an untrained lay public and a highly sophisticated body of scientific experts, gives the impression of scientistic propaganda rather than responsible journalism. The present lack of a serious critical dimension in science writing appears to owe much to still predominant views about the nature of rational explanation. Science writers promote these views whenever they suggest that interpreters of science do not require the service of philosophers, much less metaphysicians. Examples drawn from the popular writings of scientists on "the cutting edge" of physics and biology reveal that this position is mistaken. Authors examined include Stephen Hawking, Robert Lewontin, Richard Dawkins, Alan Sokal, and Stephen Weinberg.

• "Nothing Being Created Continually": Blake's Material Politics
  A scholar of English poetry argues that William Blake critiques the worldview of Newtonian mechanics, which is caught up in a complex relationship with the non-mechanical, occult alchemy at its conceptual source, Newton himself. Blake's long visionary poetry, the author contends, including The Four Zoas, attempts to "model incommensurable material philosophies and place them into circuits of exchange," and so imagines alternatives to the Newtonian worldview.

• Between Two Worlds: The Complementary Rhetoric of T. S. Eliot and Neils Bohr
  Niels Bohr and T. S. Eliot began, like many of their contemporaries, to question conventional assumptions about the gap between description and reality, reference, and referent. In response to the conundrums of quantum theory, Bohr proposed a new system of description he labelled "complementarity," which applies not only to the physicist's philosophy but also to his rhetorical style. The dualistic but mutually exclusive perspectives that characterize Bohr's writing also shape Eliot's prosody in Four Quartets. Bohr and Eliot, in fact, sometimes choose remarkably similar metaphors and syntactical constructions. This article puts Eliot and Bohr in conversation, exploring the ways in which poetic and scientific language can illuminate one another.