Thursday, March 15, 2018

Dennett's review of Thompson's Mind in Life

Continuing this post. At this link entitled "Shall we tango? No, but thanks for asking" Journal of Consciousness Studies, 18, No. 5–6, 2011, pp. 23–34.  From the Introduction:

"I have learned a lot from Evan Thompson’s book—his scholarship is formidable, and his taste for relatively overlooked thinkers is admirable — but I keep stumbling over the strain induced by his selfassigned task of demonstrating that his heroes — Varela and Maturana, Merleau-Ponty and (now) Husserl, Oyama and Moss and others — have shattered the comfortable assumptions of orthodoxy,
and outlined radical new approaches to the puzzles of life and mind. The irony is that Thompson is such a clear and conscientious expositor that he makes it much easier for me to see that the ideas he
expounds, while often truly excellent, are not really all that revolutionary, but, at best, valuable correctives to the sorts of oversimplifications that tend to get turned into mantras by sheer repetition in the textbooks and popular accounts of these topics in the media."

Some other reviews here and  here.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.