Current Working Pile
"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...
Dear Prof. Callahan,
ReplyDeleteWho is the author of the book on Say's Law ? (I suppose all the books here are worth reading, since they are on your working pile).
Are, in your view, Oakeshott's writings the best way to learn political philosophy ?
"Who is the author of the book on Say's Law?"
DeleteThomas Sowell.
"I suppose all the books here are worth reading, since they are on your working pile."
Some things are there because I *ought* to read them, so I don't yet know if they are worth reading!
"Are, in your view, Oakeshott's writings the best way to learn political philosophy?"
I'd pick Voegelin over Oakeshott.
Thank you for your answers. I have never read Voegelin, I will.
DeleteFor Say's law, I loved Hutt's Rahabilitation so much, I thought of translating the book into french. I couldn't finish Sowell's.
Start at the bottom. You'll thank me later.
ReplyDeleteBlackadder, are you commenting on a general property of working piles, or on my pile in particular?
DeleteMy comment was specifically about the desirability of reading Walker Percy, not about a general strategy for dealing with working piles.
DeleteSo I gave up my blog reading for Lent, and I happened to see the same book Blackadder did, a few months later. What'd you think?
ReplyDeleteSeemed OK, but I haven't been able to finish works of fiction in years now: I have too much work reading. I get 100 pages in and can't get back to it.
Delete