Spirit v. Matter: The 2006 Smackdown Begins

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.

More like this

There's been a copy of Snake Agent at the local Borders for a while now, but it kept narrowly losing out to other books. On a recent shopping trip, though, I was buying enough stuff that throwing another trade paperback on the pile was just a small perturbation, so I picked up a copy. The set-up…
"When we don't know what we are after, we risk passing it over in the dark." -- Three Farmers on their Way to a Dance Nominee #1: Karl Iagnemma Nominee #2: Chris Ware Nominee #3: Richard Powers Richard Powers, like the other nominees, is a creative ambassador in the broadest and most noble sense.…
Yesterday saw the posting (or at least the arrival on my RSS reader) of two different discussions of the current state of genre fiction. I have issues with both discussions, but reading them together makes for an interesting effect. First, there's Charlie Stross complaining about the state of SF,…
Sort of in the same spirit as yesterday's summer reading post, another book-related question: What's the best book you were ever forced to read for school? What's the worst? The best, for me, is probably The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien, a sort of metafictional Vietnam novel in stories. I…