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9781551119908

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Rather than dwelling on Melville's doubts and ambivalences, as many literary critics do, Evans emphasizes his certainties. She contends that in Moby-Dick he is a literary realist in the classical--that is Platonic--sense, refusing the persistent dualism of mind and world in Western philosophy since Descartes and Locke. Melville shows how concepts are formed in human activity, and he verifies the ability of language, and especially of fiction, to connect the sensible with the ideal. In this bracing, consequential book, Evans alters our understanding of the relationships among literature, philosophy (especially Wittgenstein), and aesthetics. --Samuel Otter, professor of English, University of California, Berkeley I much admire how K.L Evans brings together philosophy and literary criticism in order to provide an exciting account of what Melville sought in realism. Learned, lucid, and passionate, this book claims that realism is a less a matter of accuracy and range of accurate sensuous detail than a way of realizing the force of how those facts and the discourses accompanying them give shape to imaginative spaces. Realism for the most ambitious writers makes vivid the conceptual frameworks cultures have produced around a concrete name--like the whale. Only Ahab, and the author emulating Ahab, fully see what the whale is by imagining its full implications for those who have tried to name it accurately. A thrilling account of Wittgenstein's Tractactus provides the conceptual substance for this view of naming by stressing how Wittgenstein's states of affairs are not descriptions but images for how language has developed stages for acknowledging what naming can involve. --Charles Altieri, professor of English, University of California, Berkeley

Mahesh Ananth's Bringing Biology to Life does exactly what it promises, which is to bring to life core topics in philosophy of biology. This book will be eminently attractive not only to the relative beginner but also to the most erudite reader. Covered with remarkable breadth, depth, and elan are the following topics: the history of biological thought (notably Aristotle and Darwin), the units of selection problem, the nature of biological function, the problem of what a biological species is, and the implications of evolution for morality and ethics, psychology, and religion (especially so-called Intelligent Design). Those hoping to find a lively read will not be disappointed. -- David N. Stamos, York University

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Mahesh Ananth is Associate Professor of philosophy at Indiana University South Bend.

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