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...
Law is necessary for freedom. That is a position I'm in full concurrence with. Kant's argument for government is rather interesting: the state is necessary for making property rights "solid" (my wording for "official"). No state = no possibility of property rights. The state of nature represents mere possession and society with a state enables ownership. It's similar to what you've been saying with regards to civil society and property and presupposition of authority. You seen his argument for property?
ReplyDeleteI have not, but it sounds much like Rousseau's... Which is not surprising, as Kant credits Rousseau as a major influence.
ReplyDeleteI Kant stand it!
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