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
Wow, so now it's *really* a mystery why he only cared about the short run with his economic policies, huh Gene?
ReplyDeleteI kid, I kid.
I was thinking it was Watson posing the question to Sherlock Holmes. A similar social background at least
ReplyDeleteIdealism seems to have been quite the fashion among Brits educated during the first decades of the 20th.
ReplyDeleteIts peak was about 1900, when it dominated philosophy in the Anglo-speaking world. On this side of the pond, W. James, C.S. Peirce, and J. Royce were famous proponents of idealism.
Delete"And what d'you feel about immortality, Ken B?"
ReplyDelete"I'll take two."