Defining Art, Creating the Canon: Artistic Value in an Era of Doubt Book

201227: i have upped the rating from four as it has persisted through the years (decades...). it is not dated. though it is just past enough i can remember the ideological popular culture of the times, or the early 2000s anyways, when everything was 'genes' and 'memes' strenuously misinterpreted as active, living, personality-characterised forces in human life ie 'selfish'. midgley traces lineage of these ways of scientism all the way back to atomic theory of ancient greeks, but suggests it is the modern dualism of descartes that creates our current, mistaken, separation of ways of thought. this is not a book of science or of poetry alone. this is book of philosophy...

she notes the poetic paradigms scientists used at given evolutions, how, for example, gender inflects early modern science. gravity cannot be 'attraction' at a distance, let alone 'love', because those are female, and francis bacon was concerned in creating a 'masculine' science and rather than nurtured an understanding of nature conceived of investigations as attack, subjugation etc...

she also notes how more modern scientists, physicists in particular, are able to see their pursuit of understanding as ultimately religious, fully aware that one sort of methodology, that of natural sciences like physics, is not applicable to all sorts of science such as sociology, simply because there is no causal minimalism, no final units...

201221: great, basic idea is confusion of dualism and ideological wars between ways of thought, science and poetry. must be first read nineteen years ago, after intros to philosophy of art, of science, of language etc... and my ideals of sartrean existentialism. this is anglo philosophy that led me to phenomenology of merleau-ponty and 'freed' me from thinking science was omnicompent way of thinking... read twice