The BG Wildlife Photographer of theYear Exhibition is currently on show at The Natural History Museum’s new Jerwood Gallery in London, UK, until Feb 27, 2000. The exhibition displays all 143 winning and commended images from the 21 265 images that were submitted to the 1999 competition. The picture shown on the right, Leopard with rising moon, is the winning picture taken by Jamie Thom, 26- year-old ranger at the Mala Mala game reserve in South Africa. Thom first met this 2-year-old leopard when he was 3 months old. Shown above is one of the highly commended prints, Spotted mantis, by Chalk-Seng Hong from Malaysia; the vivid colours last only a few weeks when the mantis is ready to breed. 418 THE LANCET • Vol 355 • January 29, 2000 The science and philosophy of the senses I See a Voice: Language, Deafness and the Senses—a Philosophical History Jonathan Rée. London: Harper Collins, 1999. £19·99. Pp 399. ISBN 0002557932 I See a Voice is one of those popular science-cum-philosophy tomes that comes garnered with praise, and that more people will buy than finish reading. This is a pity. The book is a wide-ranging exploration of the senses in general, and hearing in particular. The first quarter explores our own understandings of, and historical per- spectives on, perception and the different contributions of the senses. The middle half is a history of deaf people, focusing particularly on those who have worked to facilitate deaf communication, and the great fight between sign language and oralist methods. It has to be said that this ground has already been well explored, in Harlan Lane’s When the Mind Hears, and Oliver Sacks’ Seeing Voices. The final quarter explores the five senses and the history of philosophy, parti- cularly in terms of Locke, Kant, and finally Husserl.Taken as a whole, it is a highly ambitious project, which nearly comes off. Rée has written one of those non-fic- tion books that reads like a novel. The material is fascinating, in the way that he has uncovered curious byways of the science and philosophy of the senses in a recondite trivial-pursuit meandering. He provides excellent descriptions, for example, of the way poetry works, and helps us see taken-for-granted things in a new light. He also has a fine turn of phrase: for example, we discover “behind the grand procession of great dead philosophers, the permanent puzzlements of ordinary human experi- ence”. In his conclusions he observes: “We are none of us linguistic islands, after all; more like lost swimmers out at sea, buffeted by waves and dragged by currents that have no regard for our carefully groomed individualities.” But if it’s like a novel, then the comparison is with a picaresque, such as Don Quixote. There is no strong sense of plot or unity, the historical personages have the status of minor characters—albeit fascinating, in the case of Alexander Graham Bell and others—who make brief appearances. Each chapter—and they are all very short—presents a new vignette, and it is sometimes hard to discover to which end the scholarly detail is leading us. Rée has an annoying habit of present- ing an argument or theory only subse- quently to knock it down: when it’s not a position that the reader was in danger of holding in the first place, this tilting at windmills seems rather pointless. Above all, it seems that he is in danger of failing to see the wood for the trees: there is a continual tension between the overarching argument and the histori- cal digressions. You enjoy the journey, but you do really rather want to know what the point of it all is. A consequence of this is that one wonders why certain topics have not been discussed. For example, there is little here on the science of perception and sensation, and the ways in which hearing and sight and language operate in the brain; Rée discusses Saussure, but not Chomsky. Again, there is no mention of e-mail. This new form of communication that operates both in space (like text) and time (like speech) would seem relevant to some of the arguments in the book. E-mail and the internet have liberated people with autism, who are able to communicate with others in a way that is impossible in emotionally laden face-to-face interaction. E-mail and fax have also liberated deaf people. Yet these devel- opments also point to the problem with e-mail, and, indeed, one of the difficul- ties of deafness that Rée seems not to have noticed. Communication of irony is almost impossible with e-mail, and genuine emotional contact is difficult. Psychological dimensions of communi- cation—which are central to Anthony Storr’s excellent Music and the Mind— seem rather absent from I See a Voice. If the book has an overarching conclusion, it is the espousal of phenomenology, which comes through in the last chapters and the conclusion. The book seems almost a covert argu- ment for this approach, because it reveals the foolishness of the attempts of philosophers to distinguish the dif- ferent contributions of sight and hear- ing to our experience and intellect. Yet the opportunity to explain the phe- nomenological approach—particularly Heidegger, Husserl, and Merleau- Ponty—is not taken. These difficult writers need someone of Rée’s literary skills to do them justice for the general reader. And, finally, this raises the big question about philosophy that is implicit within the historical sweep of this book: why do human beings seem always to have this urge to classify, to distinguish the different elements in experience, to break things down rather than to take them as a whole? The historical examples that Rée provides of this approach to the senses seem, from our vantage, senseless.Yet in other ways our age continues on exactly the same course, which is what makes phenomenology both necessary, and ultimately unsuccessful. Tom Shakespeare tilting@windmills.u-net.com Chalk-Seng Hong Jamie Thom