Goodbye, Descartes: The End of Logic and the Search for a New Cosmology of the Mind

by Keith Devlin

"[Goodbye, Descartes] is certain to attract attention and controversy..a fascinating journey to the edges of logical thinking and beyond." -Publishers Weekly (???) Critical Acclaim for Keith Devlin's Previous Book The Science of Patterns "A book such as this belongs in the personal library of everyone interested in learning about some of the most subtle and profound works of the human spirit." -American Scientist "Devlin's very attractive book is a well-written attempt to explain mathematics to educated nonmathematicians . the basic ideas are presented in a clear, concise, and easily understood manner. Highly recommended." -Choice "[Devlin] has found an interesting way of exhibiting how mathematics is unified . the author's presentation is a tour de force." -Mathematical Reviews A Selection of the Newbridge Library of Science and Reader's Subscription

Genres: Philosophy, Science, Nonfiction, Mathematics, Linguistics, Logic

320 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1997

About the author

Dr. Keith Devlin is a co-founder and Executive Director of the university's H-STAR institute, a Consulting Professor in the Department of Mathematics, a co-founder of the Stanford Media X research network, and a Senior Researcher at CSLI. He is a World Economic Forum Fellow and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. His current research is focused on the use of different media to teach and communicate mathematics to diverse audiences. He also works on the design of information/reasoning systems for intelligence analysis. Other research interests include: theory of information, models of reasoning, applications of mathematical techniques in the study of communication, and mathematical cognition. He has written 26 books and over 80 published research articles. Recipient of the Pythagoras Prize, the Peano Prize, the Carl Sagan Award, and the Joint Policy Board for Mathematics Communications Award. He is "the Math Guy" on National Public Radio.

Reviews

[Guy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Promises much more than it delivers and a bit of a hodge-podge that could have used a better editor. Basically the central argument of the book boils down to the following:

o the reductionist, mathematical approach that came from the Greek schools of logic and that has been so successful in science and technology has failed pretty comprehensively in (at least) two important fields: human communication and human reasoning.
o the primary difference between these two fields and those in which reductionism has succeeded is that in both cases context is critically important, and mathematics today doesn't handle context very well.

And that's it.

Most of the book is spent explaining what formal logic is and how it has developed over the centuries, salted with superficial descriptions of the various historical attempts to apply it to human language and reason. Devlin is a reasonably competent writer and the style is engaging, so some readers will find this moderately interesting (even if not particularly enlightening). For me it was a bit of waste of time, since I knew most of the historical background anyway.

Unfortunately, Devlin then devotes next to no time to exploring what a "New Cosmology of the Mind" might look like, other than to present a fairly simplistic symbolic formalism with which one can express context in equations and then on that basis to make a fairly feeble plea that (as he terms it) "soft mathematics" will therefore still have a role to play.

Well duh.

Although written in 1996, the book's weaknesses can't be explained away as being a consequence of it's being dated... no, the central problem, it seems to me, is that beyond identifying why reductionism has failed in the fields of human reason and language, Devlin just didn't have that much to say.

[Joye · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant book about the history of logic in the Western culture and, how do humans really think and communicate? I was impressed as to how complicated we really are when our thoughts, language and behavior is broken down logically and mathematically. This book makes one skeptical whether Alan Turing's test of a true AI can ever be achievd.

[Seth Vogt · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm fascinated by this subject... programming consciousness.

[Douglas Wilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Important. I categorize books like this under apologetics, not because they are written from a biblical perspective but because the reason I am reading them is to make sense of the world in which we present the gospel.

[John Fredrickson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting book, though it got tough to stay with at the end. This was an unusual book on logic, written from the perspective of its use with language and the human mind. Not the book I would have expected from a mathematician, but excellent nonetheless.

[Michael Walker · Rating 1 out of 5]

Totally forgettable book that rides the populist wave of postmodernism. As substantive as thin soup.