Tom Mcleish
Biographic Data
| ID | 2096669 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Tom Mcleish |
| GIVEN NAMES | Tom |
| FAMILY NAME | Mcleish |
| SIGNATURE | MCLEISH T |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of York |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2025-0299 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 16 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 13 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 16 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2001 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
On the origins of dance
Given that culture involves some form of transmission from one generation to the next, the question of its origins must necessarily involve activities that do not depend on its pre-existence. Dancing is significant in being simultaneously an individual and a spontaneous activity, dependent on biological underpinnings that are instinctive, for example, in human children. It is also a phenomenon present in almost all human societies and cultures as…
Before Science and Religion
Scientists today are surprised when confronted by the sophistication of natural philosophy of the thirteenth century. Although clearly of a former age and holding very different perceptions of material structure, its mathematical and imaginative exploration of nature is striking. It also finds a natural theological and contemplative framing; because of this it can work as a resource for contemporary projects constructing a ‘theology of science’ a…
Remembering John Polkinghorne
A personal recollection of gratitude reports on the way that the writings of John Polkinghorne inspired and guided the author's own thinking in science and theology since meeting him as a graduate student. Themes of both agreement and disagreement are selected from the many to be found in Polkinghorne's corpus. Closer attention is paid to two of his books, Science and Christian Belief and Faith, Science and Understanding. A running theme is the c…
Magnifying Grains of Sand, Seeds, and Blades of Grass
In his treatise On the Rainbow (De iride), composed nearly four hundred years before the first known telescope, the English polymath Robert Grosseteste identified three striking optical effects: distant objects can be rendered close by; close-by large objects can be rendered small; and distant small objects can be rendered large. In the context of the history of optics, the first effect is especially striking. Grosseteste did not give details of …
Evolution as an Unwrapping of the Gift of Freedom
Extending the approach to a ‘theology of science’ developed in Faith and Wisdom in Science (McLeish 2014), I expand its theme of the tension between chaos and emergent order, within the arc of the Biblical story of creation, towards a theology of evolutionary science. In addition to the material in Job, the book of Wisdomprovides a remarkable account of transmutation of species, within a recapitulation of the Exodus theme, that I juxtapose with a…
Taking the discussion onward
This response to the foregoing reviews of The Poetry and Music of Science identifies common themes raised by them, responds to direct questions where this is possible and suggests further avenues of discussion. It focusses in particular on issues of the historical and cultural setting of human creativity, the particular issues raised by poetry, the differences between artistic and scientific imagination, the confusion (and de-confusion) of ‘imagi…
A meta-metaphor for science
Evelyn Fox-Keller is unsurpassed in the perspicuity with which she has analysed the power of metaphor within science, to the way it defines scientific discourse, and in developing methodologies that address semantic ambiguity. This paper considers a great metaphor for science itself. The ‘Book of Nature’ idea is at least as old as Augustine, and enjoyed strong advocacy in other ages from Hugh of St. Victor, Boyle and Galileo, to name a few. Yet i…
Creativity, imagination and being in the image of God
The Poetry and Music of Science (McLeish 2019) is centrally about human stories of poiesis, of bringing into existence that which was not, and the narratives that weave the fabric of those stories.Its writing is itself an example of such a 'narrative of creation'.On my occasional high-school visits to engage students on the history and philosophy of science, I am often impressed by their critical abilities and intelligence, but frequently wonder …
Our Common Cosmos
The academic aspects of the tangled and largely misunderstood relationship between theology and science are themselves complicated further by the disciplinary fragmentation that has marked universities for the last two centuries. The apparently superficial change in usage from 'natural philosophy’ to 'science’ in the early nineteenth century has disguised, yet signifies linguistic, metaphysical and theological moves whose consequences for academi…
The Scientific Works of Robert Grosseteste, Vol. 1: Knowing and Speaking
Emergence and topological order in classical and quantum systems
The Poetry and Music of Science
‘I could not see any place in science for my creativity or imagination’, was the explanation, of a bright school leaver to the author, of why she had abandoned all study of science. Yet as any scientist knows, the imagination is essential to the immense task of re-creating a shared model of nature from the scale of the cosmos, through biological complexity, to the smallest subatomic structures. Encounters like that one inspired this book, which t…
Poetry and Music of Science
Physics met biology, and the consequence was
How many cultures? ‘Real presences’ and the healing of the academy
In this paper we re-examine the relationship and possibilities for discourse between the academic disciplines called ‘sciences’ and those known as ‘arts’. Do they represent one culture or two? An apparent diversity of views emerges in two contemporary writers, George Steiner and Nicholas Lash, the former differentiating the two, the latter insisting that the ‘two cultures’ debate itself is misconstrued. We follow the principal threads of both arg…
How many cultures? 'Real presences' and the healing of the academy
The Poetry and Music of Science
‘I could not see any place in science for my creativity or imagination’, was the explanation, of a bright school leaver to the author, of why she had abandoned all study of science. Yet as any scientist knows, the imagination is essential to the immense task of re-creating a shared model of nature from the scale of the cosmos, through biological complexity, to the smallest subatomic structures. Encounters like that one inspired this book, which t…
On the origins of dance
Given that culture involves some form of transmission from one generation to the next, the question of its origins must necessarily involve activities that do not depend on its pre-existence. Dancing is significant in being simultaneously an individual and a spontaneous activity, dependent on biological underpinnings that are instinctive, for example, in human children. It is also a phenomenon present in almost all human societies and cultures as…
A meta-metaphor for science
Evelyn Fox-Keller is unsurpassed in the perspicuity with which she has analysed the power of metaphor within science, to the way it defines scientific discourse, and in developing methodologies that address semantic ambiguity. This paper considers a great metaphor for science itself. The ‘Book of Nature’ idea is at least as old as Augustine, and enjoyed strong advocacy in other ages from Hugh of St. Victor, Boyle and Galileo, to name a few. Yet i…
How many cultures? ‘Real presences’ and the healing of the academy
In this paper we re-examine the relationship and possibilities for discourse between the academic disciplines called ‘sciences’ and those known as ‘arts’. Do they represent one culture or two? An apparent diversity of views emerges in two contemporary writers, George Steiner and Nicholas Lash, the former differentiating the two, the latter insisting that the ‘two cultures’ debate itself is misconstrued. We follow the principal threads of both arg…
How many cultures? 'Real presences' and the healing of the academy
Physics met biology, and the consequence was
Our Common Cosmos
The academic aspects of the tangled and largely misunderstood relationship between theology and science are themselves complicated further by the disciplinary fragmentation that has marked universities for the last two centuries. The apparently superficial change in usage from 'natural philosophy’ to 'science’ in the early nineteenth century has disguised, yet signifies linguistic, metaphysical and theological moves whose consequences for academi…
The Scientific Works of Robert Grosseteste, Vol. 1: Knowing and Speaking
Emergence and topological order in classical and quantum systems
The Poetry and Music of Science
‘I could not see any place in science for my creativity or imagination’, was the explanation, of a bright school leaver to the author, of why she had abandoned all study of science. Yet as any scientist knows, the imagination is essential to the immense task of re-creating a shared model of nature from the scale of the cosmos, through biological complexity, to the smallest subatomic structures. Encounters like that one inspired this book, which t…
Poetry and Music of Science
Evolution as an Unwrapping of the Gift of Freedom
Extending the approach to a ‘theology of science’ developed in Faith and Wisdom in Science (McLeish 2014), I expand its theme of the tension between chaos and emergent order, within the arc of the Biblical story of creation, towards a theology of evolutionary science. In addition to the material in Job, the book of Wisdomprovides a remarkable account of transmutation of species, within a recapitulation of the Exodus theme, that I juxtapose with a…
Taking the discussion onward
This response to the foregoing reviews of The Poetry and Music of Science identifies common themes raised by them, responds to direct questions where this is possible and suggests further avenues of discussion. It focusses in particular on issues of the historical and cultural setting of human creativity, the particular issues raised by poetry, the differences between artistic and scientific imagination, the confusion (and de-confusion) of ‘imagi…
A meta-metaphor for science
Evelyn Fox-Keller is unsurpassed in the perspicuity with which she has analysed the power of metaphor within science, to the way it defines scientific discourse, and in developing methodologies that address semantic ambiguity. This paper considers a great metaphor for science itself. The ‘Book of Nature’ idea is at least as old as Augustine, and enjoyed strong advocacy in other ages from Hugh of St. Victor, Boyle and Galileo, to name a few. Yet i…
Creativity, imagination and being in the image of God
The Poetry and Music of Science (McLeish 2019) is centrally about human stories of poiesis, of bringing into existence that which was not, and the narratives that weave the fabric of those stories.Its writing is itself an example of such a 'narrative of creation'.On my occasional high-school visits to engage students on the history and philosophy of science, I am often impressed by their critical abilities and intelligence, but frequently wonder …
Before Science and Religion
Scientists today are surprised when confronted by the sophistication of natural philosophy of the thirteenth century. Although clearly of a former age and holding very different perceptions of material structure, its mathematical and imaginative exploration of nature is striking. It also finds a natural theological and contemplative framing; because of this it can work as a resource for contemporary projects constructing a ‘theology of science’ a…
Remembering John Polkinghorne
A personal recollection of gratitude reports on the way that the writings of John Polkinghorne inspired and guided the author's own thinking in science and theology since meeting him as a graduate student. Themes of both agreement and disagreement are selected from the many to be found in Polkinghorne's corpus. Closer attention is paid to two of his books, Science and Christian Belief and Faith, Science and Understanding. A running theme is the c…
Magnifying Grains of Sand, Seeds, and Blades of Grass
In his treatise On the Rainbow (De iride), composed nearly four hundred years before the first known telescope, the English polymath Robert Grosseteste identified three striking optical effects: distant objects can be rendered close by; close-by large objects can be rendered small; and distant small objects can be rendered large. In the context of the history of optics, the first effect is especially striking. Grosseteste did not give details of …
On the origins of dance
Given that culture involves some form of transmission from one generation to the next, the question of its origins must necessarily involve activities that do not depend on its pre-existence. Dancing is significant in being simultaneously an individual and a spontaneous activity, dependent on biological underpinnings that are instinctive, for example, in human children. It is also a phenomenon present in almost all human societies and cultures as…
Philosophy (12 works) · Epistemology (9 works) · History (8 works) · Art (7 works) · Philosophy (7 works) · Psychology (6 works) · Aesthetics (5 works) · History (5 works) · Literature (5 works) · Sociology (5 works)