A most peculiar book. Highly recommended

On another site there is an on-going dialogue of the deaf regarding the nature of person and when this personhood comes into existence.  By this I mean not that various commentators are arguing with one another, or even arguing past one another; but that most commentators are content to post their own opinion and then ignore anything else that gets said.  This peculiar reluctance to engage is related I think to what John Lukacs once called the Philadelphia cult of safety. 

Just as the cult of Boston was respectability and that of New York was success, Late Modern Philadelphians were concerned with avoiding risk.  Thus, one simply did not chuck it all and head off to California but stayed with the tried-and-true.  There is much to recommend this attitude.  Cutting Edge fails far more often than State-of-the-Art, and one need only say the words "Experimental Literature" or "Progressive Education" to understand the risks involved.  But to be safe includes being safe in one's own opinions, and that makes contrary speech an intolerable threat to one's safety.  We can see that the wider Kulture today has been largely Philadelphianized.  Disagreement is treated as if it were aggression. 

But we digress.  My larger point, aside from the one under my hat, is that there are several common tropes in the discussion of person that bear examination. 

 – John Lukacs, The Passing of the Modern Age

Captive Dreams

Michael Flynn. Arc Manor/Phoenix Pick (www.phoenixpick.com), $14.99 trade paper (266p) ISBN 978-1-61242-059-2

Eddington is more agnostic about the material world than Huxley ever was about the spiritual world.

Dedicated revolutionary

1. The Rise of Modern Science
Ancients and medievals had studied Nature, but the Modern Ages were a time when Science could be spelled with a capital-S, and the mere act of wearing a white lab coat could endow the speaker with the magical ability to sell products on TV.  Science, with its effort to describe the world “as it really was” went hand-in-glove with representation in the arts.  Though which was the hand and which the glove is a fine point. 

The medievals had sought to appreciate the beauty and interconnectedness of Nature -- how Her ends meshed with one another. But in the early 17th century, a number of remarkable men revolutionized the way in which science was done by wedding physics to mathematics and engineering in a ménage a trois. 

• Mathematics.  Descartes believed that if physical theories were expressed in mathematical language, they could be proven with the same rigor as mathematical theorems! 
• Engineering.  Francis Bacon compared Aristotelian natural philosophers to little boys, who could talk, but not impregnate women [i.e., Nature] to bear children [i.e., useful products].  Descartes agreed that the purpose of science was not simply to learn about Nature, but to make men her “masters and possessors.”