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Technology has always found its greatest consumer in a nation's war and defense efforts. Since the last attempts at a "Star Wars" defense system, has technology changed considerably enough to make the latest Missile Defense initiatives more successful? Can such an application of science be successful? Is a militarized space inevitable, necessary or impossible?

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lchic - 07:59pm Sep 21, 2002 EST (# 4477 of 4481)

Professor of European Thought LSE John GRAY has an ESSAY in the NewScientist (14Sept2002 p46) entitled

I think, but who am I?

His latest book is Straw Dogs: Thought on humans and other animals.

'I think, but who am I?' Science - especially cognitive science - is challenging philosophy - if philosophers are reluctant to look at things anew, it is because the latest research is shaking the foundation of their search for the truth - GRAY argues.

Observer: John Gray is one of the most consistently interesting and unpredictable thinkers in Britain. He is unpredictable because, unlike most political commentators, he never ceases to question the underlying assumptions of his own beliefs and prejudices.

In the mid-to-late Seventies, for instance, he was one of a nexus of disaffected former left-wing thinkers who realised that if Britain were ever to lift itself from torpor and decline, if the country were to be modernised, there had to be a radical break from the stultification and mediocrity of the recent past.

... he soon became one of the most penetrating critics of the dogmatism of the Thatcher years and of the wider Conservative failure.

... In truth, he is, like JG Ballard, about whom he writes so well in Straw Dogs, a visionary. Modernity is his urgent, defining subject, and here he attempts to articulate nothing less than what the young Oxford philosopher Edward Skidelsky has called 'a total view of the world', a Weltanschauung.

http://shopping.guardian.co.uk/books/story/0,1587,794945,00.html

This is a radical work of philosophy which sets out to challenge our most cherished assumptions about what it means to be human. From Plato to Christianity, from the Enlightenment to Nietzsche and Marx, the western tradition has been based on arrogant and erroneous beliefs about human beings and their place in the world. Philosophies such as liberalism and Marxism think of humankind as a species whose destiny is to transcend natural limits and conquer the Earth. Even in the present day, despite Darwin’s discoveries, nearly all schools of thought take as their starting point the belief that humans are radically different from other animals. John Gray argues that this humanist belief in human difference is an illusion and explores how the world and human life look once humanism has been finally abandoned.

http://www.lse.ac.uk/Press/Forthcoming_books/Straw_Dogs.htm

Not yet reviewed by NYT

lchic - 08:26pm Sep 21, 2002 EST (# 4478 of 4481)

John Gray - Nukes

THE MYTH OF PROGRESS - John Gray
If we redesign nature to fit human wishes, we risk making it a mirror of our limitations.

THE NUCLEAR COST - Stephen Schwartz
Nuclear weapons are a useless burden.
http://resurgence.gn.apc.org/issues/196.htm
(see hardcopy)

lchic - 08:45am Sep 22, 2002 EST (# 4479 of 4481)

John Gray (essay) seemed to say that flat earthers had been influenced by scientists and 'thinking' had matured.

Yet, in the philosophy department, that's in using the mind optimally, thinking was 'caveman'.

lchic - 09:49am Sep 22, 2002 EST (# 4480 of 4481)

Iraq - nukes

http://www.observer.co.uk/iraq/story/0,12239,796799,00.html
http://www.observer.co.uk/iraq/0,12239,753696,00.html

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