Broken Image

by Floyd W. Matson

Paperback

Published January 1, 2000

Reviews

[Dejan Basic · Rating 2 out of 5]

Useful for the number of thinkers that it touches upon in its broad survey of the last 200 years of European philosophico-scientific thought. From the perceived ills of the 'deterministic mechanists' i.e. Laplace, Newton, to their 20th century standins, the Psychological behaviourists i.e. Watson, and their defeat at the hands of the indeterminist Copenhagen physicists i.e. Bohr, and the holist/neofreudian schools of psychology. Liberal 'Freedom' counterposed to an omniscient control of *everything* - it is difficult not to get the impression that much here is caricatured and flattened for the purposes of narrative, and there is a curious absence of discussion of the relations between the 'scientific' views of the so-called Liberal-holists and their approval of the dehumanizing and carceral Capitalist regimes, which shatter mans self image over and over again, turning him into a monotonous automaton - this being the thesis of the book. A defeat followed by a glorious revenge of sorts.