Overthrowing Saddam
I think the people who cooked up the idea hadn't read quite enough Hobbes, don't you?
"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...
Yes, indeed. Speaking of Hobbes, Gene, I was thinking about you when I wrote this:
ReplyDeletehttp://econospeak.blogspot.com/2014/06/thomas-hobbes-call-your-office.html
Kevin, are you in Montreal this weekend?
ReplyDeleteNo. I'm an idiot: I didn't realize I now need a passport to go to Canada until a colleague informed me last week. There's no way I could get one in time. I was really looking forward to it: I have a paper arguing that Smith, pace received opinion, was not an ethical subjectivist; that, influenced by Hume but not persuaded, he put the old wine of a traditonal non-subjectivist ethics in a Humean sentimentalist bottle.
ReplyDeleteMy friend heard two people talking on the subway:
Delete1: You need a passport to go to Canada?!
2: Yes, they treat it as if it's a separate country.
David Hume was an ethical subjectivist? I think he was a meta-ethical non-cognitivist, but I don't know how this might imply subjectivism.
DeleteSamson: I should have been more careful here. In the paper, I use " subjectivist," perhaps solecistically, to mean either expressivist theories, or theories that make ethical truths just truths about what we approve. So I put Hume on the Euthypro side of the debate with Socrates.
ReplyDelete