Those silly medieval people…
Who thought that just beyond the boundaries of their known world, the cosmos was full of monsters!
Oh wait, never mind…
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Oh wait, never mind…
"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. This is something I point out too. There are more crazy ideas afloat now than in the Middle Ages, and with less excuse (illiteracy for example).
ReplyDeleteSo on a site I frequent, one member asked why are super hero movies so popular, since they are so childish and stupid. (I told him he supplied the answer.) this quickly evolved into a discussion of "I agree except for the (insert franchise here) movies". From practically everyone!
ReplyDeleteFantasy is perfectly fine, Homer has monsters and gods, but I do find it amusing that with Stalin, Mao, Hitler and Pol Pot in living memory so many seem to need fantasy to imagine evil.