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
That reminds me of the great french Constitutional Lawer, Léon Duguit. His motto and basis of his work was just that, doing away with metaphysics.
ReplyDeleteWilling to found Law on facts, he ended up with the necessity of Social Solidarity. His thought is very interesting, and we could say, but Duguit wouldn't aknowledgethat, that he rebuilt traditional Natural Law, only his social order would be without God.
But I still don't understand why his fact of social solidarity should oblige the conscience.
By the way, his only disciple, Roger Bonnard, supported Pétain and his Révolution nationale (which is not meant to discredit neither Duguit) after 1940.