Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.— Kurt Vonnegut Vonnegut’s admonition came to my mind several times while reading Calculating God. Sawyer’s book is foremost a piece of entertainment and should be treated as such. On this count, it is not a bad read, and maybe even deserved the Hugo nomination it received. Nonetheless, Calculating God presents an abundance of philosophical annoyances.[1] Calculating God follows a Canadian paleontologist, Thomas Jericho, as he is contacted by an […]
Monthly Archives: March 2007
2 posts
The internets are trying to kill me with frustration. I simply seek intellectual camaraderie and this is what I get on a LibraryThing thread concerning the Continental/Analytic divide in philosophy: In my ever so humble opinion, so-called analytic philosophy is puerile trash. Real philosophy is in the work of the continental writers and thinkers – it confronts questions that affect us everyday, all the time, instead of burrowing into some self-aggrandizing, pseudo-scientific cocoon of trite figures and games and childish conclusions. It depresses me that all this trivia is called “philosophy” in the Anglo-American West, and that it’s used to […]