Anyway. "Modern Mind". Finished it. I'll try to sneak in some sort of review/reaction here soon, but it's a pretty big (773p) book, and there's a lot to say, so I think I'll let it rest for a bit before trying. Not only that, the topic of "20th century thought" is somewhat dear to my heart. Yeah, a century's a theologico-historically arbitrary grouping of a decimal-centric quantity of an astronomically parochial unit of time, but, like Grrrl of Cat and Girl says, I live here. I was only around for the last twenty years of it, and was only aware of the things going on around me enough to actually say that I really experienced, at most, the last ten, but — it's the cradle of nearly everything I do or aspire to do. Modern formal logic, computer science, linguistics as we know it, the skepticism of postmodernism, the self-reference of deconstructionism, the spectre of the banality of evil, the birth of a vital secularism, and the triumph of (Watson is obviously fond of Dennett's phrase here) the "best idea ever": the idea that mere godless darwinian selection might be an adequate explanation for all life and intelligence and meaning in the world.
Anyway. "Modern Mind". Finished it. I'll try to sneak in some sort of review/reaction here soon, but it's a pretty big (773p) book, and there's a lot to say, so I think I'll let it rest for a bit before trying. Not only that, the topic of "20th century thought" is somewhat dear to my heart. Yeah, a century's a theologico-historically arbitrary grouping of a decimal-centric quantity of an astronomically parochial unit of time, but, like Grrrl of Cat and Girl says, I live here. I was only around for the last twenty years of it, and was only aware of the things going on around me enough to actually say that I really experienced, at most, the last ten, but — it's the cradle of nearly everything I do or aspire to do. Modern formal logic, computer science, linguistics as we know it, the skepticism of postmodernism, the self-reference of deconstructionism, the spectre of the banality of evil, the birth of a vital secularism, and the triumph of (Watson is obviously fond of Dennett's phrase here) the "best idea ever": the idea that mere godless darwinian selection might be an adequate explanation for all life and intelligence and meaning in the world.
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