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Analytic philosophers once pantomimed physics: they tried to understand the world by breaking it down into the smallest possible bits. Thinkers from the Darwinian sciences now pose alternatives to this simplistic reductionism.

In this intellectual tour--essays spanning thirty years--William Wimsatt argues that scientists seek to atomize phenomena only when necessary in the search to understand how entities, events, and processes articulate at different levels. Evolution forms the natural world not as Laplace's all-seeing demon but as a backwoods mechanic fixing and re-fashioning...

When Preacher Mike Barlow meets Seamore the Smottosaurus on the shores of Hawaii his first thought is to run away as fast as he can. The prehistoric creature with bulging eyes and protruding teeth looks very intimidating, but the singing dinosaur that has been around since the fifth day of creation soon reveals his true nature. He isn't wild and ferocious like he first appears, he's quite friendly and docile. The only thing 'ferocious' about him is his insatiable appetite, which Mike learns the hard way when he offers to pay for his lunch.

Preacher Mike slowly discovers that...

Although virtually unknown in his lifetime, Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) is counted today among the great nineteenth-century poets. His poetry was collected and published posthumously by his friend Robert Bridges in 1917, and subsequently Hopkins's reputation flowered, though more as a modern writer than as Victorian, and very little as a poetic theorist. Yet the body of Hopkins's critical writing reveals sharp insight into the subject of poetics, and presents an innovative theory that locates primary poetic meaning in 'figures of speech sound.'

These 'figures of speech sound'...

The sixteen essays in this volume form a series of related focuses upon various levels and areas of literary criticism. W.K. Wimsatt's assumption is that practice and theory of both the past and the present are integrally related-that there is a continuity in the materials of criticism-that a person who studies poetry today has a critical concern, not merely a historical interest, in what Aristotle or Plato said about poetry. He regards the great perennial problems of criticism as arising not by the whim of a tolerantly pluralist choice, but from the nature of language and...

These ten essays, written over a period from 1950 to 1962, are bound together by their common concern with questions of the meaning of criticism and the larger meaning of literature itself. These difficult questions W.K. Wimsatt treats with characteristic wit and penetration, ranging easily from a broad consideration of principles to incisive comment on individual writers and works.

The first part of the book is devoted to a discussion of literary theory. Wimsatt reviews the development of critical dialectic from the German romanticism of Schelling and the Schlegels to the mythopeic...