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...
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas -- unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
I haven't read your article, but Brad Birzer (a cool prof at Hillsdale) talked it up on Facebook, so it must be good...
ReplyDelete"We can still use his term 'Gnostic' while acknowledging, as he did, its questionable historical connection to ancient Gnosticism."
ReplyDeleteYeah, that seems fair. I would drop the capital G, though.
By the day, I love the play on words in the title.
"By the day, I love the play on words in the title."
ReplyDeleteBut by night he hates it! :-)
In any case, you must compliment my esteemed editor, Dan McCarthy, on the title. My titles generally suck.
"I haven't read your article..."
ReplyDeleteBob, you read it months before it was published!