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...
And on top of that, the claim that Marx was a ponderous, boring writer turns out to be a lie. I haven't read Capital and don't expect to, but I randomly followed a link to a passage of The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon earlier this year and ended up reading the whole thing in a day because it was just that well-written. He knew how to turn a phrase, and he could be scathingly funny.
ReplyDeleteI'm told his dispatches re the American Civil War are also excellent.
It's their professor who is ponderous and boring, Jim.
ReplyDeleteIndeed.
ReplyDeleteLenin et al, right up to at least 1905 and possibly 1917, assumed that Russia was not yet ready for a socialist revolution -- that it would have to fully emerge from feudalism, evolve a bourgeois middle class and a capitalist economy first.
They assumed that because that's precisely how Marx and Engels envisioned things in their theory of history.