Some week ago, I pointed to the right/left dichotomy in the seminal book by Thomas Kuhn. In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, he distinguishes between normal and “revolutionary events”. Normal science is what scientists do all the time. Every normal science investigation tries to add a little more knowledge, but always within what Kuhn called the paradigm. Paradigms are accepted theories, models, and methods that can stand up to peer review. Revolutionary events are paradigm-changing moments that occur when the current paradigm, say Newtonian mechanics, cannot explain some observation. Most of the time the inquirer gives up and moves on.… Read More
Continue ReadingA Crisis Is a Terrible Thing to Waste.
Not since WWII has there been such an opportunity for self-examination and behavioral change. The COVID-19 pandemic poses the same unsettling force to societies around the Globe, with one big difference, the enemy is not some other nation, but an invisible, still mysterious force. If the US is an example of what is being done in other nations, the immediate responses have been to isolate individuals to slow down the spread of the virus and pump money into the economy to soften the blow, caused by the first step. As I write this, the number of cases of COVID-19… Read More
Continue ReadingThomas Kuhn, Iain McGilchrist, and the Divided-Brain
I am always looking for examples of dichotomous situations that add to the credibility of McGilchrist’s divided-brain model. The more instances that it explains something important, the more likely it will be accepted as a new, paradigmatic design model for attacking those “big,” persistent problems in our individual and cultural lives we are struggling to overcome. Last night, as I was in bed, trying to quiet my thoughts, one really good one popped up. I have been reading a series of essays by Richard Rorty, collected in his book, Philosophy and Social Hope (great read). One is devoted to a… Read More
Continue ReadingSufficiency, Caring, and the Right-brain
One of my colleagues, after a look at my new book, suggested that I had omitted an important concept, sufficiency. True, the word does not appear anywhere in the text, but the idea lingers in the background. Sufficient must take its meaning from some reference state or quality, as the amount of something just enough to achieve or attain that stage or quality. In particular, the concern raised is triggered by the impending collapse of the Earth’s life support system. The global consumption of energy and goods is destabilizing the Earth’s capacity to maintain human and other living creatures’ habitats.… Read More
Continue ReadingEmotional Intelligence
In my daily ramblings through my email and on the web, I often spot something worth commenting on in my blog. Thinking back to when I started blogging about 11 years ago, I divided my posts between ones about my books and somethings about politics or the state of the world. I cannot do much with the latter topics these days. it’s just too depressing. But I still can try to tie my own work to the larger picture, and that’s what follows in this post I was reading a post from one of my regular weekly bloggers and found… Read More
Continue ReadingRight v. Rights
I have been doing some computer and files housekeeping, and uncovered an older article from the NYTimes “The Stone” column (about philosophy), that merits comment. The article, “What We Owe to Others: Simone Weil’s Radical Reminder,” by Robert Zaretsky recalls that her “reflections on the nature of obligation offer a bracing dose of sanity in our perplexing and polarizing times.” It’s a great article and deserves to be read in its entirety. Zaretsky focuses on Weil’s concern about the focus on one’s rights, a personal concern versus what is morally right, an impersonal, universal concept. The problem, for Weil, with… Read More
Continue ReadingOne More Uncanny Encounter
As I was preparing to update a syllabus for a course I was considering to give at my learning-in-retirement “school,” I rediscovered a paper I had written about 10 years ago. It had the academic title of, “Reductionism and Its Cultural Fallout.” It was a polished version of a talk I had given at a conference. Most of it was taken from my first book, Sustainability by Design: A Subversive Strategy for Transforming our Consumer Culture. It was a pretty good paper, but the point of this post is that I noticed a table comparing two sets of “ideas,” which… Read More
Continue ReadingJohn Dewey and the Brain
I realize that the divided-brain model is unfamiliar and strange to most of my readers and followers. I included some examples of how it works in explaining a wide variety of social and individual actions in the book, but I will use this blog, from time to time, to point to additional examples. Today, I have an excerpt from John Dewey’s, Liberalism and Social Action. This work was published in 1935, relatively late in his extraordinarily long productive life. He wrote: Let me mention three changes that have taken place in one of the institutions in which immense shifts have… Read More
Continue ReadingSea Change or Just a Ripple
On August 19, 2019, the Business Roundtable made waves in the business press and the media in general with this press release. The key paragraph reads: Since 1978, Business Roundtable has periodically issued Principles of Corporate Governance. Each version of the document issued since 1997 has endorsed principles of shareholder primacy – that corporations exist principally to serve shareholders. With today’s announcement, the new Statement supersedes previous statements and outlines a modern standard for corporate responsibility. The full “Statement on the Purpose of a Corporation” is quoted below. Americans deserve an economy that allows each person to succeed through hard… Read More
Continue ReadingRichard Rorty and the Right-brain
I am reading some of Richard Rorty’s work this summer. I was moved to do this by a critical paper that examined his political program. The paper, by Joshua Forstenzer, is titled, “Something Has Cracked: Post-truth Politics and Richard Rorty’s Postmodernist Bourgeois Liberalism.” The paper in available online from the Harvard Kennedy School Ash Center’s occasional papers. The title comes from an extract from Rorty’s 1998 book, Achieving Our Country, Forstenzer includes as a prefatory note. I have filled out the quote (underlined) to reflect the full impact of the original. Edward Luttwak for example, has suggested the fascism may… Read More
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