"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness
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...
:-D
ReplyDeleteBut it's not a personality cult. Nope. Can't be. That's what people who vote for Obama are involved in.
Damn it - I should use the google machine before I post things like that: http://www.jailbreaktoys.com/The_Obama_Action_Figure_p/ob000.htm
ReplyDelete:)
You looked, didn't you?
ReplyDeleteHopefully when he receives it he can shove it right in his... collection of cool action figures. Yeah! That's the ticket.
ReplyDeleteIt's all good. Daniel's still cool in my book, I just don't think that it is a good idea (in many cases) for he and I to discuss foreign policy and war. We're like fire and ice on such topics.
I imagine my conditions for talking civilly about war are much the same as yours, Joseph.
ReplyDeleteWe both hold our positions because we don't like aggression, and neither of us appreciates the insinuation that we are pro-aggression. Right?