But there is another side of the coin. The sciences are more and more reliant on ideas taken from the humanities without acknowledgement - the "Big Bang," for example, "the God particle," the "selfish gene." The infiltration of the sciences by the humanities (again, without acknowledgement) is explored in the work of many of the most celebrated theorists of science in practice: viz, Ian Hacking (Historical Ontology and The Emergence of Probability) and Paul Feyerabend, Against Method. We will assess these trends, explore what is methodologically unique to the humanities, weigh the meaning of the word "materialist," discuss the politics of scientism, and think about the reasons for its current prominence. It would have been possible to find relevant readings from many genres: novels, criticism, manifestoes. But for reasons of time, we will concentrate on position pieces, methodological inquiries, and histories of science and the humanities in order to cover as much territory as possible. There are a number of important works on our theme, obviously, that we will not be able to consider. Time permitting, I will be supplying you with supplementary bibliographies to point you in the direction of relevant work by: Democritus, Epicurus, Lucretius, Francis Bacon, Benedict de Spinoza, Rene Descartes, G. W. Leibniz, Giambattista Vico, William Blake, Auguste Comte, Alan Turing, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Karl Popper, J. D. Bernal, Douglas Hofstadter, Friedrich Nietzsche, Bruno Latour, Henri Atlan, Gilles Deleuze, Alain Badiou, Stanislaw Lem, R. F. Georgy, and others.