Megan Poole discusses Listening to Beauty with Lauren Freeman

About the Book:

A moving study of how encounters with beauty advance scientific discovery.Our attempts to understand the world are always more than simply rational. Our bodies learn through lived experience, our natural environments challenge what we think we know, and we take lessons from our nonhuman kin. Even scientists, often considered paragons of rationality, frequently describe their findings in the language of beauty. For rhetorician Megan Poole, beauty is integral to how scientific research works.Drawing on interviews with leading biologists, Poole explores what happens when scientists set aside objectivity and listen for beauty around them. The wonder we feel at the plumage of birds, the melodies of whales, or the caretaking of elephants may not help us (on its own) to isolate a given fact, but such encounters may teach us to open ourselves to a different way of knowing entirely. Through stories about researchers’ encounters with wonder, Listening to Beauty reveals how scientific discovery happens sometimes unsystematically, sometimes incoherently, often beautifully.

About the Authors:

Megan Poole is an assistant professor in the Department of Rhetoric and Writing whose interdisciplinary, community-engaged research and teaching examines how persuasion and knowledge-making occurs through more-than-discursive, sensory modes. Her work amplifies the importance of valuing ways of knowing that derive from bodily, lived experience and considers how coalitional spaces provide diverse approaches to solving problems in local communities.

Lauren Freeman is a Professor of Philosophy at University of Louisville and Director of the M.A. in Applied Philosophy. She is the author of Microaggressions in Medicine (with Heather Stewart, OUP 2024), co-editor of Microaggressions and Philosophy (Routledge, 2020), and was editor of The American Philosophical Association’s journal Studies in Feminism and Philosophy (2019-2022).

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