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 really wanted to answer, "They have cinemas in Ireland?" But, it's a bit of an inside joke.
ReplyDeleteAn American friend of my family visits Spain one day and he and my uncle go out to get something to eat. My uncle goes to an ATM machine and the friend, completely serious, goes, "They have ATMs in this country?"
I mean, Spain was pretty much a developing nation until the mid-80s, but still...
Was it grand-da Callahan?
ReplyDeleteJames Joyce
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