Gianluca Bocchi, Mauro Ceruti

The Narrative Universe

Hampton Press, 2002

From Series Editor Alfonso Montuori’s Foreword:

“The Narrative Universe was a critical success in Italy, and has already been translated in several languages around the world. Now English-language readers can immerse themselves in a book that represents a milestone in the intellectual development of two thoughtful, original, and encyclopedic scholars. […]
The Narrative Universe can be read on several levels. It is, on the surface, a fascinating and erudite overview of many of the most exciting areas of scientific research today. It addresses fields as diverse as cosmology, linguistics, the philosophy of science, evolutionary theory, mythology, and paleontology. But it is also an account of how this research points to a new way of understanding the world. The authors outline, for instance, the importance of what they call the Darwinian revolution; the recognition that living species are their history. The implications of such a statement are enormously far-reaching, and the authors gradually unpack them in a sustained meditation about time, space, and knowledge. […]
The authors also take us into the history of Europe, the conquest and destruction of “the New World”, religious wars, and the quest for purity, whether racial, ethnic, religious, or ideological, the fear of pollution and consequent expulsions, exclusions, and rites of purification and cleansing, culminating in the ongoing scourge of “ethnic cleansing”. […]
The Narrative Universe spans many different disciplines, crossing the historical divide between the human and natural sciences. […] Going beyond disciplinary fragmentation without building one overarching, totalizing and homogenizing synthesis, The Narrative Universe creates a whole that carefully reflects multiple and complex strands of its diversity, rather than attempting to force them into a vacuous and mutilating “theory of everything”. […] The authors provide us not only with a masterful overview of the new sciences, but also with new ways of thinking, and new ways of inquiring into our origins: into the Narrative Universe.”

The book has been published in Italian, English, Spanish, Portuguese.

Foreword by JEROME BRUNER