Full Circle

Full Circle: The Moral Force of Unified Science is the work of a group of scientists, led by Edward Haskell, who developed a theory of everything that reveals a moral orientation throughout nature. A primary inspiration for this group was the work of Mendeleev, who identified common characteristics among chemical elements that enabled the creation of the Periodic Table of Chemical elements, which orders the elements into groups and periods. Full Circle extrapolates this ordering to apply to all of the seven kingdoms of nature, abiotic, biotic and human. Two of Haskell's main collaborators (who graduated with him from Oberlin before going on to careers in academia), were Willard Quine, a mathematician and philosopher at Harvard, and Harold Cassidy, a chemist and author of science textbooks at Yale. The first edition of this book was published in 1972 on the occasion of the convening of a conference in New York under the title: The International Conference on Unified Science, which was organized by Haskell. ICUS (albeit with the name slightly modified to read: International Conference on the Unity of the Sciences) would develop into a major international gathering attracting Nobel laureates and other distinguished men and women of science in a series of 20 conferences. Full Circle, however, would be the only book on Unified Science authored or edited by Haskell, who passed away in 1990. It has been out of print since 1972 and only now, in 2024, has it been edited and republished by Thomas Cromwell, a one-time student of Haskell.