From The Chronicle, remembering Richard Rorty: The pragmatist philosopher who died this month may have been soft-spoken, but he caused more than his share of scholarly brawls. Slate asks a number of philosophers and intellectuals to share reminiscences of Dick Rorty, personal and otherwise. A review of The Meaning of Life by Terry Eagleton. In a speech, President JF Kennedy said that if only Karl Marx "had remained a foreign correspondent, history might have been different". How wrong he was, argues Christopher Hitchens. Much of Marx's writing during his years as a hack was a passionate defence of the values that were to inform his political philosophy.
From The Global Spiral, Basarab Nicolescu (ICTRS): Transdisciplinarity as Methodological Framework for Going Beyond the Science-Religion Debate; Mark Sagoff (Maryland): Is an Environmental Ethic Compatible with Biological Science?; Jean L. Kristeller (ISU): Quiet Mind, Meditative Mind and Emerging Wisdom: A Transtheoretical Model of the Wisdom Process; David Allan Larrabee (ESU): A Reductionism Based Challenge to Strong Emergence; Michael Ruse reviews Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge by E. O. Wilson; and a review of Why Religion Matters: The Fate of the Human Spirit in an Age of Disbelief by Huston Smith.
From Scientific American, should science speak to faith? Lawrence M. Krauss and Richard Dawkins exchange their views on how scientists ought to approach religion and its followers. From TNR, Jerry Coyne reviews The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism by Michael J. Behe. A review of Negotiating Darwin: The Vatican Confronts Evolution, 1877–1902. For weeks, the physics world has been buzzing with rumors juicier — at least in context — than any Washington scandal: Researchers at Fermilab's Tevatron particle collider may have made one of the biggest scientific discoveries in decades, the Higgs boson, sometimes dubbed the "God particle". Biology's Big Bang: What physics was to the 20th century, biology will be to the 21st—and RNA will be a vital part of it.
A new study suggests that the so-called Goldilocks planet is too hot to be like Earth, but astronomers have uncovered another, cooler option. Can studying the red deserts of Mars, the thick atmosphere of Venus, and the methane seas of Titan help us to predict our own planet's climatic future? An Earth Without People: A new way to examine humanity's impact on the environment is to consider how the world would fare if all the people disappeared.
Michael Shermer on the prospects for Homo economicus: A new fMRI study debunks the myth that we are rational-utility money maximizers. From The Economist, a review of The Myth of the Rational Voter by Bryan Caplan. A look at how George Mason University economists practice their own brand of "Freakonomics".
