Fagan, Melinda Bonnie. Review of Steve Fuller, SCIENCE. NDPR (February 2011).

Fuller, Steve.  Science: the Art of Living.  Montreal: McGill-Queens UP; Chesham: Acumen, 2010.

Steve Fuller's Science challenges widely held assumptions about scientific values, the relation of science to religion, and the significance of the Intelligent Design movement. The book is part of Acumen's Art of Living series, aimed at a general audience. Each volume in the series is a personal reflection on the question: "How should we live?" as this relates to a specific topic: Work, Pets, Faith -- here, Science (ii). Fuller fulfils his brief with a bracingly heterodox account of the values animating scientific inquiry. Science consists of nine substantive chapters, a brief introduction, and a concluding bibliographic essay. Each chapter expands on an overall thesis: "the art of living scientifically involves taking theology much more seriously than either practicing scientists or religious believers are inclined to do" (1). Fuller construes science as a long-term, social enterprise of knowledge-production, which requires justification and support. He locates values necessary for these in the Western intellectual tradition, specifically Christian theology. This characterization of science underwrites Fuller's polemical claim that intelligent design and creationism are more in tune with the ethos of science than some currently established theories, notably Darwinian evolution. Science is thus a rejoinder to recent popular works championing scientific atheism on Darwinian grounds. Though many of its ideas appear in Fuller's previous publications, Science updates earlier arguments and presents his distinctive views to a general audience. . . .

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Thicke, Mike. "Steve Fuller -- Science." THE BUBBLE CHAMBER September 9, 2010.

Fuller, Steve.  Science: the Art of Living.  Montreal: McGill-Queens UP; Chesham: Acumen, 2010.

Historian and philosopher of science Steve Fuller has long embraced his role as a public intellectual. As part of that mission, he testified in the 2005 Dover school board trials, arguing that intelligent design could legitimately claim scientific status. He has since written two books on the intelligent design controversy. Science, his latest effort, is part of The Art of Living series. It is ostensibly an exploration of what it means to “live scientifically,” but is more accurately described as an argument for the necessary connection between science and theology.

Fuller’s central argument should be no surprise to those familiar with his previous commentary on intelligent design. It is a two-pronged pragmatic argument. On the one hand, Darwinism is dispensable: most work in biology does not rely on Darwin’s theory of evolution (think molecular biology). On the other hand, religion is indispensible for scientific progress: without believing that the universe has been designed to be intelligible to humans, there is no motivation for scientists to attempt to comprehend it. However, in Science Fuller goes further than this. He also claims that a designer with intelligence resembling our own is the best explanation for the success of science. . . .

Read the whole review here: http://thebubblechamber.org/2010/09/science/#more-48.

Grayling, A. C. "Origin of the Specious." NEW HUMANIST 123.5 (2008).

Fuller, Steve. Dissent Over Descent: Intelligent Design's Challenge to Darwinism. Cambridge: Icon, 2008. It is sometimes hard to know whether books that strike one as silly and irresponsible, like Dissent over Descent, the latest book from Steve Fuller, are the product of a desire to strike a pose and appear outrageous (the John Gray syndrome), or really do represent that cancer of the contemporary intellect, post-modernism. I suppose putatively sincere extrusions of the post-modern sensibility might henceforth deserve to be known as “the Steve Fuller syndrome”. For this offering by the American-born sociologist is a classic case of the absurdity to which that sensibility leads. . . . (http://newhumanist.org.uk/1856) Fuller's reply "Against the Faith": I wish I could repay AC Grayling’s compliment by naming an exotic mental pathology after him, but regrettably his review of Dissent over Descent displays disorders of a much more mundane kind: he has merely failed to read the book properly and does not know what he is talking about. Other than a sense of the chapter titles, the reader of his review will learn nothing about the contents of the book. My only difficulty in responding to Grayling is that he connects so little with what I actually say – for example, his longest quote from me is eight words. However, based on what Grayling himself says in the review, my guess is that he cooked it up using this five-part recipe: 1. Flip book’s pages to find names of philosophers. (Hint: index may prove helpful.) 2. Note that author positions these philosophers in unfamiliar ways that seem to make Intelligent Design (ID) look good. 3. Condemn immediately by applying A-level intellectual history boilerplate. 4. Appease readers whose own knowledge is also at this level and whose prejudices are like those of the reviewer. 5. Repeat as necessary. In light of this modus operandi, I conclude that either Grayling simply did not “read” the book as ordinarily understood, or he was afraid to admit he was not up to the job of reviewing it, and so he figured he could bluff his way by saying philosophy-looking things that effectively preached to the converted (i.e. “new humanists”). . . . (http://newhumanist.org.uk/1880) Academics can be so vicious. I wonder why we can't simply agree to disagree?

Dusek, Val. "Review of Steve Fuller's THE KNOWLEDGE BOOK." NDPR (July 2008).

Fuller, Steve. The Knowledge Book: Key Concepts in Philosophy, Science and Culture. Montreal: McGill-Queen's UP, 2007 Steve Fuller's work is in the format of Raymond Williams' Keywords, Elizabeth Fox Keller and Elizabeth Lloyd's Keywords in Evolutionary Biology, and, more recently -- and aptly -- Cary Nelson's Keywords in Academia: a Devil's Dictionary for Higher Education. The work contains forty-two succinct entries, averaging four to six pages long, on a number of notions of relevance to science studies. It contains, for instance, under P: Philosophy versus sociology, Postmodernism, and Progress; under R: Rationality, Relativism versus constructivism, Religion, and Rhetoric. The entries are extensively cross-referenced. The work was originally published in Japan, where there are a number of skilled interpreters of Fuller's social epistemology. . . . Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=13666.