Abstract
Montaigne once said 'Everyman has within himself the entire human condition'. The trialling of ideas and positions via a subjective experience reveals broad philosophical considerations. Personal essays firmly entrenched in the literary tradition, including writings by Charles Lamb, Virginia Woolf and George Orwell, are characterised by conversational, free form, confessional, and aesthetic style. They feature comment on the human condition, and use irony, inter-textuality and self-argument. This same approach is now being embraced by some contributors from a discipline traditionally (in the last century at least) opposed to such an artful process. Popular science writing essays now share much more, stylistically and audience wise, with other non-fiction genres (for example, travel writing, autobiography, and creative historical non-fiction) than with science writing in the academy. The key examples of this phenomenon to be analysed in this paper are select works by Oliver Sacks, Robert Sapolsky and Natalie Angier. Such works juxtapose corporeal and visceral creativity, detached empirical evaluation and, most interestingly, an almost hyperbolic reference to texts themselves: a heightened textual self-referentiality or poioumena. In popular science we see interplay between the text, in a literary and aesthetic sense, and science, in the empirical and quantitative sense. But story becomes more than a device for elucidating the empirical; there is a suggestion of the human as story and philosophical comment on the nature of humanity.