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This quiz consists of 5 multiple choice and 5 short answer questions through The Arts and their Interpretation.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. How has the postmodern fragmentation of knowledge affected consilience, in Wilson's account??
(a) It has created the conditions for unification.
(b) It has generated unprecedented discussions between disciplines.
(c) It has opened new fields.
(d) It has not been useful.

2. What do the arts do that makes them different from the sciences, in Edmund Wilson's account?
(a) Implicate qualities, instead of defining them.
(b) Generate sensations, instead of measuring them.
(c) Register sensations, instead of generating them.
(d) Prophesying laws, instead of revealing them.

3. What is consilience?
(a) An underlying pattern that tends toward unification.
(b) A historical basis for unifying fields of study.
(c) An agreed approach to different subjects.
(d) A proposal for reorganizing departments of knowledge.

4. What is the only way to get a clear picture of the world, in Wilson's account?
(a) To integrate natural science with social sciences and humanities.
(b) To separate humanities from natural science.
(c) To add philosophy and ethics to all natural sciences.
(d) To divorce the natural science from social sciences.

5. What would need to be true before we could establish the goals and progress of evolutionary processes, in Wilson's account?
(a) We would have to have tools that would let us predict how random acts would play out.
(b) We would have to know the future of our race.
(c) We would need to know that evolution tended toward increase complexity.
(d) The human race would have to have been obliterated like the dinosaurs.

Short Answer Questions

1. How did Locke distinguish between culture and history?

2. What did Descartes argue for, in Wilson's account?

3. Whose ideas influenced the formation of the French slogan "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity"?

4. What can biological research do for complexity theory, in Wilson's account?

5. What subject would Wilson like to see more of in undergraduate education?

(see the answer key)

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