See also Home

Science and the Humanities
How the nature of mind is related to the processes undergone by metamorphic insects."In this book author David Spooner proposes a close connection between aspects of insect evolution and the functioning of the human intellect. By examining seemingly disparate subjects - entomology, language history, genetics, literature and music - Spooner shows how such a synthesis is possible. Once this fusion is achieved, the human species can be seen as connected not just to the great apes, but also not only via genetics and embryology, but via consciousness to metamorphic insects. The book also presents arguments on the roots and nature of the mind in the work of Daniel Dennett and Terrence Deacon."
Science and the humanities
"In this volume, Spooner makes use of the most recent data from science to strike out in an interesting direction by returning to one of the great unresolved mysteries: how to fuse science and the great works of imagination without doing violence to one or the other of these great human enterprises."
Poetry and Entomology
A consideration of poets from Darío to Rueda and Lorca; Cernuda and Aleixandre to Valente.

Quick Links

Find Authors

Budick, Kant & Milton

October 19, 2010

Tags: Budick, Kant, Milton

Over the past 30 years, when wanting any literary criticism I have found myself returning to the great classics of the mid-last century - books such as J.F. Danby`s Shakespeare`s Doctrine of Nature or Caroline Spurgeon`s Shakespeare`s Imagery. Deliberate obfuscation has long overtaken contemporary criticism, with the exception of pioneering all-encompassing masterpieces like Norman O. Brown`s Love`s Body & Life against Death.

So it was with a sense of real intellectual excitement that I began to read Sanford Budick`s volume Kant & Milton (Harvard UP, 2010). Here at long last is a book that sets the philosophical gelignite fizzing beneath the negative judgments of Messrs T.S. Eliot and Leavis who dislodged Milton from favor those many years ago. (more…)