I have just finished working my way through David Mazella's book on The Making of Modern Cynicism, which has helped fill in some of the gaps that existed for me in the earlier portions of our conversations (thanks!) and also, I think, offers something of a way forward from where we are now.

As I follow the argument (and David will of course correct this if it's off) tracing the prehistory of cynicism can teach us quite a bit about its role in modern morals and politics. For starters, the ancient Cynics insisted on the philosopher's public life as "the truest expression of the consequences" of his philosophy, the place where his "doctrines could be examined by the public for their truth or fraudulence."

This description seems to me similar to Serendip's contemporary role in encouraging public conversation among as large and diverse a group of thinkers and writers as it can gather (see Serendip's Evolving Web Principles & Guidelines for Publishing Thoughts on Serendip ) -- with the important caveat that the goal here is less "correction" or "truth-seeking" than the "adventure" of creating "new appreciations."

Where the two projects--the work of the ancient Cynics and of contemporary Serendipians--seem to me most clearly to intersect is in their shared refusal to uphold what David calls the "untenable distinction between political action and political language":

"these attacks betray their impatience with the vagaries of free discussion, which they figure as an empty delaying tactic designed to forestall genuine action or change....Consequently, certain kinds of doubts may not be admitted into political discussion, or certain kinds of discussion may not even taken place, because they hinder 'our' ability to act decisively."

Taking the time to think --as the reflective Cynics once did, as the thoughtful Serendipians now do...there both humanists and scientists find common ground?

If so, then: on to the next question--

Alice suggests that the conventional distinction between the objects of science and those of humanities--between "first-hand observation" and "culturally embedded" phenomena--is blurry: since "observation is culturally situated," we can't disentangle "naturally observable phenomena...from our stories of them."

This seems to me a great place to pick up on the proposal that scientists and humanists have something to learn from one another regarding our teaching experiences. Scientists might profit from recognizing their social situatedness, the embeddedness of their observations in cultural forms. What else might humanists have to learn from scientists?