Links on Fodor & evolution

What Darwin Got Wrong, by Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, has provoked a lot of bloviating, ad hominem abuse. Probably, the best critical reply is that by Ned Block and Philip Kitcher. Here's an exchange between Fodor & Piattelli-Palmarini and Block & Kitcher. There's also this excellent dialogue between Fodor and Elliott Sober. Sober wrote an earlier paper (pdf) about Fodor's views on evolution.

Update (March 22, 2010): Fodor and Sober continue their exchange on Leiter's blog. There's also this note by Terry Tomkow.

Update (March 23, 2010): Here's a new piece by Sober (pdf).

Update (March 24, 2010): Here's Fodor in TPM.

Update (March 28, 2010): Here are three posts by former or current Rutgers students.

Update (May 11, 2010): Here's Richard Lewontin's review in the NY Review of Books.

Update (May 13, 2010): Fodor & Piattelli-Palmarini have a letter in the April 28 issue of the TLS, in which they reply to Samir Okasha's review of their book.

Update (May 24, 2010): Robert Richards' review.

Update (Aug. 3, 2010): John Dupré's review, Peter Godfrey-Smith's review, Fodor & Piattelli-Palmarin's reply to the latter in the LRB letters section

Update (Aug. 11, 2010): Godfrey-Smith's reply in the LRB letters section

Gödel, Platonov, Brautigan, Goldstein and more

Kurt Gödel, whom P. D. Smith described as 'an uneasy amalgam of Einstein and Kafka'

Alan Saunders interviews Mark Colyvan on Aussie radio about Gödel. There's also this BBC4 radio interview on Gödel, but I can't get it to play

Can you imagine walking with Gödel and Einstein while they talked about Kant? Ah, but, you see, it is doubtful in our enlightened day that Kant was such a great philosopher after all

Peter Smith's site is the go-to resource for those who want an introduction to Gödel's theorems

Rebecca Goldstein recommends five novels of ideas -- Synchronicity! It so happens that I had just begun reading two of her picks, Herzog and Middlemarch, when I saw this. Herzog is among the many US bestsellers in this impressive database

Here are two reviews of Goldstein's book against God. She also had a book about Gödel, and here she is in dialogue with David Eagleman

And here are two reviews of Jerry Fodor's (and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini's) book against some elements of evolutionary theory, presaged by Fodor's 2007 article in the LRB. According to the publisher's page, Noam Chomsky likes this book (which isn't to say that he agrees with its arguments). More here

Here's an Antipodean radio interview of Tzvetan Todorov about his defence of the Enlightenment, and here's John Gray dissecting the saccharine distortions in Todorov's book

Was Andrei Platonov Russia's greatest modern prose stylist? His book Soul was among Elif Batuman's four alternative modern Russian classics

Thomas Bernhard's publisher correspondence

Stephen Mitchelmore on Bernhard, Sebald and M. Amis

Last year, I linked to a spate of posts about Richard Brautigan and now there's been another spate, with pieces by Michelle Quinn, Robert Pincus and Billy Colllins

Fearing anarchy, Hobbes embraced tyranny

Fed up with tyranny, 19th-Century anarchists resorted to terrorism. Here are two reviews of Alex Butterworth's new book on them

Andrew Pessin's book, The God Question, looks like a good introductory text

Diarmid MacCulloch's History of Christianity looks good, too

Seamus Heaney interviewed

Travel stories by poets and novelists

Joseph Epstein on Svevo's novel Zeno's Conscience (ht Books, Inq.)

Literary translators in Germany face funding cuts

"To illustrate just how big this unresolved debt threat has become, [John] Lanchester (along with others) estimated that the total cost of the financial system bailout in the United States is bigger, in inflation-adjusted terms, than the combined cost of the Louisiana Purchase (in 1803, by President Thomas Jefferson), the New Deal (the 1930s), the Marshall Plan (1948-52), the Korean War (1950-53), the Vietnam War (1961-75), the savings and loan crisis (the 1980s), the invasion of Iraq (2003) and the entire NASA program, including the moon landings."

Update (March 15, 2010): WRW on Daniel Medin's TLS review of Robert Walser's The Tanners

Philosophy of Mind in Ian McEwan's Saturday

I liked Ian McEwan's Saturday partly because of its focus on the mind-body relation. The main character, Dr. Perowne, is a materialist -- there's nothing more to a mind than a brain.

Perowne regards three persons through this reductionist lens:

1. Perowne's alcoholic father-in-law, a complicated poet whose foibles grow predictably from the effects of alcohol on the brain;

2. Perowne's mother, who suffers from dementia; the sections about her are the most profound in the book, focusing on the pathos and tragic affront when a good and caring person is deleted by brute, neural wiring malfunctions; and

3. Baxter, the intelligent thug; the issue here is the conflict between, on the one hand, our natural moral indignation at the heinous crimes of a free person and, on the other hand, the picture of the criminal as an unfree victim of his own gnarled neural wiring. (Shades here of philosopher Wifrid Sellars' contrast between the Manifest Image [our common, everyday sense of ourselves and others as free and responsible persons] and the Scientific Image [in which those persons dissolve into amoral atom-swarms].)

Here's an ambiguous quotation in connection with that last point:

“Who could ever reckon up the damage done to love and friendship and all hopes of happiness by a surfeit or depletion of this or that neurotransmitter? And who will ever find a morality, an ethics down among the enzymes and amino acids when the general taste is for looking in the other direction?”

I've earlier quoted a nice philosophy-of-mind passage from McEwan's Atonement. Here's a phil-of-mind quotation from Saturday, this time on philosopher Jerry Fodor's notion of 'Mentalese', an innate representational medium with syntactic structure in which the mind does its thinking or representing (I believe Fodor developed the idea under Chomsky's influence):

“This is the pre-verbal language that linguists call Mentalese. Hardly a language, more a matrix of shifting patterns, consolidating and compressing meaning in fractions of a second, and blending it inseparably with its distinctive emotional hue. … So that when a flash of red streaks in across his left peripheral vision … it already has the quality of an idea … unexpected and dangerous, but entirely his, and not of the world beyond himself.”

The main weakness of the novel is its plot, which seems implausible and jury-rigged in places, as if McEwan had notebooks full of good passages and riffs that he was itching to publish and just threw together any old narrative in which to embed them. The book is marred also by some smug political musings that are espoused by Dr. Perowne and that resemble some of McEwan's own political views. (I suspect that a lot of the recent, blogosphere animus against McEwan stems from disapproval of his politics. But who knows?)

Regardless, while it isn't as good as Atonement, there's some great writing in Saturday.

Here are some interesting reviews of Saturday, one of them by the late Richard Rorty.