From: Technotranscendence (neptune@mars.superlink.net)
Date: Mon Sep 11 2000 - 19:43:51 MDT
On Monday, September 11, 2000 2:33 PM Dan Fabulich daniel.fabulich@yale.edu
wrote:
> I was expecting bad philosophy which relied heavily on resemblances to
> make its inference. This is bad philosophy in the same way that
> Hofstadter's GEB is bad philosophy: he draws your attention to a
> number of interesting things that have a certain resemblance, and then
> goes on to suggest that this resemblance is more than superficial.
> (Yes, look, they ALL have STRANGE LOOPS; therefore, er, therefore
> they're all very interesting.) [Good books may nonetheless contain
> bad philosophy.]
Great overall point! I agree in regard to _GEB_ and Hofstader's overall
output. It seems like geek philosophy: know a few interesting facts, weave
them together, and voila! you're a genius!
I also agree that good books often bad philosophy often. An example that
comes to mind is _Order Out of Chaos: Man's New Dialogue With Nature_ by
Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers. The stuff on chaos in it, especially
dissipative structures, was great. (I read this when I was in high school,
over ten years ago.:) The pseudo-Marxist dialectics, however, is something
they could've left out.
On the whole, a lot of knowledge is specialized. I think when you get
intelligent people writing books, though, they tend to overgeneralize,
extending their grasp of a specific topic to all topics, to all reality.
Hence, books like _GEB_ and the like.
Cheers!
Daniel Ust
http://uweb.superlink.net/neptune/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 15:30:55 MST