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Title: What Makes Us Think? A Neuroscientist and a Philosopher Argue about Ethics, Human Nature, and the Brain by Jean-Pierre Changeux, Paul Ricoeur, Paul Ricur ISBN: 0-691-00940-6 Publisher: Princeton University Press Pub. Date: 15 August, 2000 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $55.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.5 (2 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: A Startling Encounter for those willing to do the work
Comment: This book will blow your mind, er, your mind. Um, well, which is it?
This exchange between the Neuro-Scientist and the Philosopher is utterly gripping - but only if you are willing or caoable of the sustained concentration needed to acquire the sophisticated arguments and subtle differentiations that they each make. It is worth doing so.
In an age where scientistic triumphalism feels no need to explain itself, its methods, or its assumptions, to a public capable of understanding it (i.e., after the destruction of our education systems and the dumbing down used by the media and the government to prevent any meaningful "political" debate - i.e., the "political" as "that which concerns us all"), this book is some kind of touchstone - and a dozen similar books should be following it on a dozen different science/philosophy topics. For starters, who is informed enough at this level (which this wise people make so accessible to the willing reader) on: stem cell research, the origins of the universe, surveillance technologies, and so many other scientific "advances".
If this is the standard of public discourse in France, we are all sadly stupid in comparison.
We need such before we perish from our ignorance.
Rating: 2
Summary: Intelligent, disorganized, lively, pompous
Comment: The topic matter of this study--the interface between the sciences of neurobiology and philosophy as they try to resolve the mind-body problem of dualism vs. monism--is extremely promising, and the participants in the debate (Jean Changeux and Paul Ricouer) are eminetly qualified to attend to it. Their discussion is exciting and thoughtful, though it is marred by their lack of a common language (which seems to undermine their whole strategy from the beginning). They can't even agree at times on basic terms, and at times they try to cover these differences by engaging in an irritating exchange of name-dropping (thereby belying the claim on the book's dust jacket that this book is accessible to non-specialists--you're expected not only to know who Kant and Spinoza are and what they've said on the subject, but also the Churchlands, Eccles, etc.) and "mutual admiration society" overpraising of one another. You do come to learn the impasses in their respective disciplines in speaking to one another, but the book seems very scattershot and happenstance. It seems like a noble project that failed due to a lack of structure and to the participants' oversized egos.
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Title: Conversations on Mind, Matter, and Mathematics by Jean-Pierre Changeux, Alain Connes, M. B. Debevoise ISBN: 0691004056 Publisher: Princeton University Press Pub. Date: 07 December, 1998 List Price(USD): $21.95 |
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Title: Wider than the Sky: The Phenomenal Gift of Consciousness by Gerald M. Edelman ISBN: 0300102291 Publisher: Yale University Press Pub. Date: 10 March, 2004 List Price(USD): $24.00 |
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Title: Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain by Antonio Damasio ISBN: 0156028719 Publisher: Harvest Books Pub. Date: 01 December, 2003 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: The Problem of the Soul: Two Visions of Mind and How to Reconcile Them by Owen Flanagan ISBN: 0465024610 Publisher: Basic Books Pub. Date: 01 July, 2003 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: Consciousness: A User's Guide by Adam Zeman ISBN: 0300092806 Publisher: Yale University Press Pub. Date: 01 March, 2003 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
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