A Cultural History of Causality

Reviews / Votes

"[An] ambitious book... [Kern's] focus on murder keeps things pleasantly lurid, and his erudition and passion shine through on every page."--Publishers Weekly "Thoughtful and carefully done, the fruit of considerable research."--Richard A. Posner, Science "Kern has mastered the novels, the critical literature, and the works by philosophers and sociologists bearing on his thesis... [R]eaders familiar with the novels will see them in a new light."--Jonathan Beard, Scientific American "As a history of science and ideas, Kern's study succeeds brilliantly. Gathering the disparate knowledge systems of nearly two centuries into discrete categories, Kern produces a taxonomy of causality that is cogent and convincing... From Enlightenment positivism to quantum discontinuity; from religion to existentialism, and phrenology to cybernetics; from Freud to Nietzsche to Foucault, and from Darwin to Durkheim to Derrida: Kern ranges comfortably (and profitably) among them all. Specialists and novice alike will find much hereto learn and admire."--Peter Okun, American Historical Review "Murder stories, Kern argues, are a sort of cultural repository of thoughts about causality, of how things fit together. From the pseudo-scientific deductions of Conan Doyle to the postmodern self-reflections of Don DeLillo, Philip Kerr and Robert Coover, detective stories demonstrate how we cope with the biggest contingency of all: conscious killing."--Mark Kingwell, The Globe and Mail "Causality, Stephen Kern concedes, is hard to define and even harder to prove... [T]his book is highly recommended to everyone interested in smart and engaging interdisciplinary scholarship."--Peter Okun, American Historical Review "[An] impressive study of causality... Kern offers some fascinating insights into the relationship between science and literature, as well as the history of our attempts to explain the why and wherefore."--PD Smith, The Guardian