I follow the line taken by – among many others – the American poet Robert Duncan, who said, “I in no way believe that there is such a thing as ‘just language’, any more than there is ‘just footprints’. This kind of reductive approach has had a good innings, but I have never subscribed to it. Origin of Species is well worth the read, but no one can argue it isn’t more interesting in context, from Malthus and Lyell to Wallace to Spencer, as well as a consideration of the very good challenges to Darwin’s theory of natural selection thrown up by both exiled Russian biologists and amateur women naturalists in the United States.Īnd biographies remind us that works of ideas and works of art are made by actual individual human beings, rather than being an agglomeration of “texts”, with the human agency of their existence being disregarded as at best an irrelevance. Why read books about great thinkers? Why not try and read what these "great thinkers" have written? Or maybe read both.?īecause a lot of times the context is just as interesting and sometimes more interesting than just the ideas standing alone.
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