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This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

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

2. How does consilience work?

3. What political movement did Condorcet inspire?

4. How do Gnostics and alchemists view snakes?

5. How does Wilson describe the strength of the French Revolution?

Short Essay Questions

1. How does Wilson offer dreams as an example of the need for consilience?

2. How does Wilson use evolution as a parallel for consilience?

3. What does E.O. Wilson mean by the Ionian Enchantment?

4. How would you describe Rousseau's influence on Wilson's idea of consilience?

5. How would you describe Rene Descartes' influence on Wilson's idea of consilience?

6. What is the modern understanding of how the brain works?

7. What three-part division does Wilson divide the brain into?

8. How does Wilson describe what it is possible to know about the brain?

9. How does the modern theory of dreams explain something like the presence and significance of snakes in dreams, in Wilson's account?

10. How is knowledge accepted as settled, or final?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Is consilience a project for government planners or for university budgets? Is Wilson advocating a role for consilience in government or in education?

Essay Topic 2

How does Wilson refute claims by philosophers of individual experience, who say that truth is personal, and that the search for unity of knowledge will always result in self-opposition, as Freud shows is the case in the unconscious? Does Wilson seem to be at war with himself anywhere within the book, or are his ideas consistent with the possibility of unification of knowledge?

Essay Topic 3

Part of Wilson's argument about the value of science is the technology that science has required for its own purposes, or produced for consumers, but applied science seems to be different than the pure science Wilson is talking about throughout 'Consilience', especially when the perpetual drive to innovate in business has required the policy of planned obsolescence, where everything technological is designed to be superseded by new products in the future. Does this present a problem for consilience, or is this beyond the scope of Wilson's argument? How do science's industrial uses, which seem to tend toward dispersion, relate with the possibility of science's unification?

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