A cura di @Anna.

Su Scientific American, una recensione di The Ashtray (Or the Man Who Denied Reality), un libro sulla vita e il pensiero di Thomas Kuhn scritto da uno dei suoi più feroci critici, il documentarista Errol Morris.

In 1972 Thomas Kuhn hurled an ashtray at Errol Morris. Already renowned for The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, published a decade earlier, Kuhn was at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and Morris was his graduate student in history and philosophy of science […]

Morris attacks the cult—my term, but I suspect Morris would approve, since it describes a group bound by irrational allegiance to a domineering leader–of Kuhn. “Many may see this book as a vendetta,” Morris writes. “Indeed it is.”

Morris blames Kuhn for undermining the notion that there is a real world out there, which we can, with some effort, come to know. Morris wants to rebut this skeptical assertion, which he believes has insidious effects. The denial of objective truth enables totalitarianism and genocide and “ultimately, perhaps irrevocably, undermines civilization.”

Immagine da pixabay.