The Grouch was on his travels. It was supposed to be a boat trip up the Rhine, with stops at cities of interest. But the boat was seized in a bankruptcy proceeding and the tour company offered to switch a bus for the boat. The family agreed and off we rolled, through Holland, Germany, France and Switzerland. It’s not always fun to read about the vacations taken by other people, so I’ll try to be judicious. In Basel, which is a lovely city with a strong artistic and scientific heritage, I stumbled on the 3ooth anniversay of Leonhard Euler (1707-1783), the Swiss mathematical genius. The family was walking along past some modest buildings which turned out to be the Math department of Basel U, and taped up in the window was a small poster announcing a series of commemorative lectures and other events to mark Euler’s Tricentennary. Later on, we had a beer on the porch of the Hotel Euler, and raised the glasses to ole Leonhard’s memory. Some have labeled Euler the greatest mathematician of the Eighteenth Century, and his contributions were enormous. Although a Swiss by birth and rearing, he spent most of his adult life in St.Petersburg or Berlin at the academies of the two Greats, Catherine and Frederick, who loathed one another. Euler had eye trouble for much of his life and in later life went blind, but his prodigious memory and powers of concentration/computation allowed him to continue his researches. He left so many manuscripts that the Academy press was still grinding them out, thirty years after his death. Euler Circles, Euler’s Number, Euler’s Theorem, Euler’s Angle, the beat goes on, and his work in celestial mechanics, calculation of orbits, ballistics, plus number theory put him right up there among the greats. Come to think of it, I should have had two beers. Maybe I did.
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Animal rationale, that’s the traditional definition of Man, our old pal Homo sapiens. Over the centuries, philosophers, psychologists and others have pondered what they considered the specific difference between us and the rest of Creation, the ability to reason, and they wondered how, exactly, all that reasoning got done, and what, exactly, it means “to reason” about something. They are still at it, as a new book demonstrates. In fact, they never really stopped, or even paused in their reflections. The new issue of Science has what’s seems to be a generally fair review of: How We Reason,by Philip N. Johnson-Laird, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2006. 583 pp. $57.50. The reviewer is Robert Sternberg, of Tufts University, who briskly summarizes the book’s arguments, states his views on whether they do or don’t carry the freight promised ( an account of how we reason) and also helps the reader get some background about where this particular work stands in the total Cog-Sci tradition. Sternberg is a tough grader, especially on the claim that reasoning, done properly, can help us all lead better, happier lives, and that reasoning only fails in this when its power is diluted by the effects of emotion. The Grouch has usually avoided talking about Cog-Sci and its various sects, but maybe that policy needs a re-think. For one thing, there is a very significant body of publication in this field, with major works released for both the general and specialist market. For another, it’s interesting. And finally, there’s a “tradition” working here all right, in that many of the questions the Cog-Sci mavens discuss go back to Aristotle, via the Scholastics and the early Modern philosophers…Locke, Berkeley, Spinoza etc. We’ll see what happens.
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