Defending the Humanities: Metaphor, Nature and Science

by Patrick Curry

Patrick Curry argues that in this time of ecocide, one of our urgent intellectual duties is to defend the humanities. Both they and the natural world are under assault by the modernist Megamachine, especially its engine charged with power-knowledge which he terms ‘technoscience’. The roots of this enmity lie in parts of Greek philosophy that are lodged deep in Western scientific metaphysics, with its longstanding hostility to overt metaphor. And metaphor, as Curry shows, is not only a kind of thinking or knowing but is fundamental to embodied life.