Sunday, June 20, 2010

Not so up-to-date ...

... 21st century enlightenment? (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

... I don't buy the notion that contemporary science is throwing up all kinds of new insights into what it is to be human. Some say, it's that we now realise that our capacity for reason also depends upon our emotions. Have they never read Plato or Aristotle, for whom that was taken as read? Others say, we now know that we're not very good at choosing what makes us happy. Now know? Isn't that the assumption of pretty much any and every pre-Enlightenment thinker of note, to saying nothing of many since, like Freud?

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