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
This is just an educated guess, with an emphasis on "guess," but maybe Keynes was just being nice. He did read, and positively review, several books in German. It's true that some of Mises' ideas were unique and complicated, but I feel that Keynes understood enough of it and didn't find it convincing.
ReplyDeleteYes, Jonathan, I think you are correct. Others have documented Keynes's extensive knowledge of German.
DeleteNevertheless, the phenomenon he notes is real.
Just admit it Gene: Your linguistic abilities are most suited to a totalitarian society.
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