I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose
Gene, I think you're a cool guy, but I suspect if we went backpacking through Europe, I would be driven to homicide.
ReplyDeleteAnd Bob, if homicide is indeed what you were driven to, no doubt there would be some who would conclude that, objectively, you did the right thing.
ReplyDeleteJust kidding, of course.
Ridiculous, Tom -- homicide is always OK if you just subjectively decide it's OK!
ReplyDeleteAs Aristotle pointed out, no moral subjectivist actually puts his "principles" into action -- witness Tom's outrage when he thought I had hidden my post to avoid his 'scathing' critiques.
ReplyDeleteHomicide is OK precisely when there are no witnesses. The classic mistake in homicide is assuming that the only witnesses are the person or persons dead.
ReplyDelete