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...
I forgot to post the link to the Bramwell article. It's here.
ReplyDeleteFor some reason this post reminded me of this Austin Bramwell article in which he discusses how the conservative movement hampers and stunts good thinkers by trapping them inside an intellectual ghetto (my words). I think libertarians are in the same position. Who outside the Mises Institute takes Murray Rothbard seriously? Does the Mises Institute hurt or help Mises' overall image?
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