Tuesday, July 14, 2020

FOUND WHOLE BOOKS!

Found among the papers I’m sorting are — so far — TWO books I started but which disappeared before I got very far.  I was accusing the cats.

“Wild Dog Dreaming: Love and Extinction” by Deborah Bird Rose.  (2013) A blurb from “Choice” says:  “Rose, an anthropologist, uses the dingo as a touchstone to explore ethical connectivity between human and nonhuman life . . . a well-referenced, wide-ranging, and sometimes abstract dialogue between dreamtime stories and Western existentialist philosophy on life, death, kinships, and dualism with nonhuman life.”  Rose is an Australian professor though her name sounds like a Native American.

“The Measure of Madness: Philosophy of Mind, Cognitive Neuroscience, and Delusional Thought” by Philip Gerrans. (2014) The dustjacket flap says:  “Gerrans proposes that delusions are narrative models that accommodate anomalous or highly salient experiences without the “supervision” of higher cognitive processes present in the nondelusional mind.  This explanation illuminates the relationship among delusions, dreams, imaginative states, and irrational beliefs that has perplexed philosophers and psychologist for over a century.”  Gerrans is also an Aussie prof.

Those of you who have the delusion that I’m someone out of “Little House on the Prairie” can just stuff it.  This is not “long grass” country and not flat.  This is a short-grass ecotone, which means it descends from mountains to desert. And some of us read "intellectual" books and some of us do not.  And some of us do both.

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