John Giannone

Although I have not gotten (even) half-way into this book, I am enjoying it immensely. The single drawback, as I have seen it, is Harari's writing on the objective, subjective and inter-subjective: 117-118. The distinctions are popular, but philosophically inadequate-if not simply botched. The objective phenomenon and the subjective phenomenon are part of the inter-subjective landscape. Their sense is fixed by human cooperation. It may very well be that radio activity killed Marie Curie, but that would be just a scramble of we-don't know-what were it not within the inter-subjective landscape. That it says anything at all lies within that landscape.

I cannot help objecting to the imperial philosophy that run through Carroll's book. It is not by substance that we have come to accept the view that the feel and the look of everyday objects is incompletely described by everyday language. Clearly, knowledge is one thing, dominion, an other. The idea that "it is all just physics" is obscene in its brevity and wrong as a proposition. So much for the author's insulting cuteness!