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Spirit has done well in past years, jabbing and ducking, bobbing and weaving, while Matter has met every lunge, every uppercut, everything. It's a stalemate, for any reasonable viewer, but the odds-makers are still booking it and the networks are still promoting it. The whole fight is ill-conceived, I fear, born of some prior age when oddsmakers still thought there was a battle to be fought, when they were still in the flush of modern youth with the belief that spirit and matter were to set be against one another....
...I'd have to point to the literature of the early twenieth-century, to James Joyce, and Herman Hesse, and Thomas Mann, et al. (Or Kant long before.) Hell, there goes C.P. Snow and all his two cultures and, even though that's not a spirit-matter thing, when debating it or using it or referring to it people interpret it as the material science in the one corner and the non-material humanities (so you can't do an experiment to test it) in the other. And then here we are with religion and science arguments, with faith and reason (pick any number of issues, Darwin-related or not), and again that doesn't map onto exactly to an old spirit-matter battle, but it does usually get booked on the same night, in the same arena, with the same judges and scorekeepers.
Basically, what I'm curious about is, there wasn't anything in the Philosophy of Science category on the front scienceblogs page, I'm awaiting a near-future discussion of Hermann Hesse's Glass Bead Game, and I want to be able to put a link in that near-future discussion to a set-up for it, so now that I put this post up, let it be.
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