Wittgenstein'in Böceği

by Martin Cohen

Böceklerden mi daha çok korkarsınız, felsefeden mi? Wittgenstein'ın Böceği aralarında Newton'ın kovası, Lukretius'un kargısı, Salvatius'un gemisi, Platon'un mağarası ve elbette Wittgenstein'ın böceği bulunan capcanlı örneklerle bezeli eşsiz bir tarih anlatımı eşliğinde, okuru felsefe tarihinin en önemli alanlarından "düşünce deneyi" geleneğine katılmaya davet ediyor. Son bölümdeyse Cohen, yeni keşifler adına gücünü kullanmayı öğrenmek isteyenlere "düşünce deneyi" yönteminin anahtar noktalarını sunuyor.

Genres: Philosophy, Science, Nonfiction, History

180 pages, Paperback

First published November 10, 2004

About the author

Martin Cohen is a well-established author specializing in popular books in philosophy, social science and politics.

I have a book being published November 2018 on the sociology of food this year, called provocatively 'I Think Therefore I Eat'! with an emphasis on how historical philosophers have approached the 'food issue'. It's a popular 'explainer' kind of book, already given a nice plug by Eater!

Food is very much an interdisciplinary area - though it is often treated in a narrow, specialised way. There is the nutritionist's perspective, the economist's, the cook's, the ecological... the list is as long as we want. And each perspective is 'valid', but only partial. So I think it's a good place to bring in a little philosophy.

Part of the book looks at the historical views of well-known philosophers on food (they have indeed had some!) but most of it looks at modern theories which are still philosophical in a fundamental sense, including for example, the ideas that we are living in an 'obesogenic' environment, or that our bodies, far from being guided by a single essential soul, are really constructed out of an uneasy alliance of micro-organisms.

It's published by Turner in the US mid-November, and this is their page for the book including my video trailer if you would like to see a little movie!

For rights inquiries, please contact my literary agent:

Mark Gottlieb
Literary Agent
Trident Media Group
mgottlieb@tridentmediagroup.com
(212) 333-1506
https://www.tridentmediagroup.com/

So, the book contains analysis of many current food-related debates,
including the vexed question of the obesity epidemic, which is much more complicated than merely people eating the wrong things, a fact that won't surprise many of us have explored by trying to go on a diet ourselves!

But perhaps the 'USP element' in it is more on what those venerable philosophy gurus had to say anyway. On the social science side, these two extracts give the flavour:

1. If you went by TV and the newspapers, you could be forgiven for thinking that celebrities, be they chefs or models, have more of a handle on the key food issues than qualified doctors and nutritionists – let alone philosophers. And you might well be right. Because the worst thing about food science, the elephant in the room, is that it’s not just the opinions that are changing – but the ‘facts’ themselves shift too. To get to the bottom of the food question. requires us to tease apart the strands of diet science and biochemistry, as well as an ounce of economics and a dash of human psychology.

Rather the obesity epidemic is an economic issue as I put in back in 2016 in an article for the Guardian newspaper. "The causes of the epidemic are complex, spanning the social sciences to biology and technology"

I took the same issue a bit further when I compared figures for childhood obesity - and found more evidence that, as I wrote, "It's poverty, not individual choice, that is driving extraordinary obesity ..."

Incidentally, the same sort of disgraceful thing applies to educational achievement. Did you know, that you can pretty much do away with exams (hooray!), as exam results mimic exactly a student's position in the class hierarchy (boo!). Shocking and disgraceful and no one - of course - s gong to do anything about it.

So that's really the the Politics of Food Science – as I put it for Gavin Wren's fabulous Brain Food Magazine at Medium , wri

Reviews

[Iván Pazo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesante planteamiento de los experimentos mentales y de la fuerza del razonamiento teórico. Sin embargo la mayoría de los experimentos tienen un análisis muy simplón. Salvaría 4 o 5 de ellos.

[Gerard · Rating 3 out of 5]

Esta bien, pero podria haber profundizado mas en algunos experimentos, hay mucha mas chicha que extraer que simplemente comentar el primer párrafo de la wikipedia...

Podría ser perfectamente un video de youtube largo. Capítulos de una página, que hacen que prestes atención y que quieras ver el siguiente.

[Evan K · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm not well-versed in philosophy so take my opinion with a pinch of salt, but overall I enjoyed it. I can't deny it got me thinking.

But some the thought experiments I had to look into myself because the explanations in the book weren't clear enough to me.

[Zeynep · Rating 4 out of 5]

ergenliğimin en güzel yıllarında, aslında var olup olmadığına emin olamadığım tozlu halk kütüphanesinin bana kattığı dönüştürücü etkili bir kitap. düşünce deneylerini sunuş şekillerini sevmiştim.

[John Hawkins · Rating 2 out of 5]

Very disappointing.

What could have been a great primer on one of the essential tools of philosophy, is held back by the author's mediocre understanding of many of the issues he discusses. The prime example is the 'thought experiment' by Wittgenstein that serves as the name of the book. Wittgenstein held that the idea of private language was incoherent because languages were games played between people. His beetle experiment was designed to make this idea concrete by proposing a world in which we all owned a private box containing a beetle. Mr Cohen provides a direct quote from Wittgenstein's Investigations in which he (Wittgenstein) clearly states that the word beetle, if used in such a society, could not be referring to the thing in the box. Mr Cohen then turns around and tells us that the point of Wittgenstein's experiment is to show that we assume that because we use the same word as other people we are talking about the same thing. This is not what Wittgenstein said, and he says this clearly in the text.

To make matters worse, Mr Cohen returns to pick on Wittgenstein's Beetle at the end of the book as an example of a poorly done thought experiment. It fails to meet several of Mr Cohen's criteria for successful thought experiments. One needs to note that it is Mr Cohen who has massaged the definition of a thought experiment to get Wittgenstein's beetle in, and then he criticises its performance, all the while failing to understand it.

I am not going to mention the numerous fallacies the author pens on many topics of science, and his horrendous attempts at jokes. The only reason I am giving the book 2 stars is because the discussion of Searle's Chinese room argument is excellent. Read this chapter and then throw the book away.

[Will · Rating 2 out of 5]

I felt like this book wasn't necessarily bad, but that it didn't bring much to the table. The vast majority of the book was a simplified "A-Z" presentation of a few famous thought experiments (some of which, I admit, were interesting). That being said, the book didn't delve into the thought experiments at a deeper level, but rather presented and moved on. I suffer the preconceived notion that exploring a philosophical concept ought to take more than two pages, so I was underwhelmed with the analysis.

Then, the last section was a rudimentary "how-to" guide for thought experimentation, but the rules touted were simplistic like "be clear" and "choose your words carefully."

All in all, a quick but ultimately disappointing read. I recommend 30 minutes on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy online rather than 2 hours with this book.

[carl caesar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Una interesante propuesta presentando 25 experimentos mentales y haciendo un análisis del experimento mental en si, como de los experimentos mentales que muestran en el libro.

Pese a quedarse un poco escaso de lineas, ya que es un libro bastante fino, llega a hacerse un poco pesado en el repaso de los 25 experimentos mentales que van desde la filosofía analítica pura a las ciencias. Pero tras los experimentos mentales, viene el análisis que hace el autor, que a mi gusto es lo mejor del libro y lo mas relevante.

Recomendaría este libro a cualquier interesado en la filosofía, la ciencia y el pensamiento.

[Conrad · Rating 2 out of 5]

This could have been really cool. There’s something that bugs me about Cohen that I can’t exactly put my finger on. It probably has to do with how vocal he is against certain philosophers in his little compendiums without much argumentation in support. Plus, maybe it’s just the books I read, but he’s more of an editor than a philosopher, putting together books from other people’s works. It was the same way in 101 Philosophy problems. Anyway, this book promised to be cool, being 26 thought experiments. Cohen explains some well, some clumsily. And I was a bit underwhelmed by the experiments myself. Was he skipping some grander ones?

[Raphael Rosen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wittgenstein! Thought experiments! What more could you ask for? I liked this book, though the explanation for the Lucretius' Spear experiment wasn't as clear to me as I thought it could have been.

[Gibb · Rating 5 out of 5]

A real smorgasbord - lots of ideas from science and philosophy, but the A-Z style is witty and accessible.

[Marco · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting, accessible introduction to the theme. Plus: dad jokes.