Seeking a Wiser Worldview in the Twenty-first Century: Micheal O’Siadhail’s The Five Quintets (II)

It may be that the most comprehensive issue for worldviews of the twenty-first century is the theme of the fourth quintet, ‘Finding’, in Micheal O’Siadhail’s The Five Quintets. The theme is summarised in the fifth stanza of the epigraph: how we understand and respond to the sciences. Whether we look at the cosmos and its stars, or at the sub-atomic level and its quarks, we face conceptions of the nature of reality that radically differ from earlier centuries. ‘Finding’ engages mainly with the natural sciences, but also with some other areas of inquiry that have affected worldviews, such as archaeology, linguistics, and the social sciences.