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Title: Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology by Gregory Bateson, Mary Catherine Bateson ISBN: 0-226-03905-6 Publisher: University of Chicago Press (Trd) Pub. Date: 10 March, 2000 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $20.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.11 (9 reviews)
Rating: 1
Summary: Buzzwords mixed toghether in a pile of dross
Comment: Take all the buzzwords in fashion in psychology and philosophy: classification, genotype, flexibility, somatic, discrete, threshold, characteristics, analytic... mix everything together and you get this book.
In other words there's not an ounce of meaning in those 700 pages, it's all worthless. No case studies, no examples, long phrases full of self importance written by someone who thinks he's an authority in everything from zen to medecine to evolution theory to archeology. Not only does he prove he doesn't understand anything, you'll laugh yourself silly reading any paragraph of the book at random.
If you have to read this for an assignment, you'd better change major and give it to your worst enemy for toilet paper. That's how low I think of this. And to think that a tree was felled for this. Ha !
Rating: 4
Summary: Very good intro. to Bateson
Comment: Reading "Steps" helped save me from the unremitting horrors of divorce court; I'd probably be on a death row somewheres if not for this & some peripherally associated material. I am very pleased to see that it's in print again.
From those meticulous metalogues to those essays on the Theory of Logical Types, Bateson can mesmerize, if you're prepared for it. "Steps" is to science & reason what Frost's "West Running Brook" is to poetry: an intense meditation, soliloquy & dialogue. It's worth your while.
Rating: 5
Summary: Back In Print, Finally.
Comment: After my paperback copy of SEM decayed from several readings, I was more than a little disappointed to see that it had gone out of print. I'm glad that its finally back.
Absolutely, Bateson is a "sloppy thinker," just as Picasso was a "sloppy painter" by the standards of Vermeer and Rembrandt. And really a comparison to artists - not formal theorists - is the metric by which Bateson should be judged.
Why is it that Bateson attracts such loyalty? Because his writing illustrates a *process* of thinking, rather than a specific indisputable conclusion. Those who expend the time and effort to read Bateson - and in particular SEM - are rewarded with the certainty that the thinking process is as interesting as any possible conclusion. And it is somewhat more than "clever" that in the SEM dialogues, Bateson uses the very structure and form of his writings to illustrate the content he's explaining.
Indeed it is precisely that uncertainty which vexes "formal" theorists (such as the reviewer below). Bateson - as a systems thinker - was always more interested in process and context than in defining any literal end result. After all, what possible "proof" could be offered that dolphins are second-order thinkers because they can learn about learning?. How on earth could proof be gained that icons and verbalizations are mediated by dreaming?
I would offer this question to Bateson's critics: if his thinking is so irredeemably sloppy, what then is his lasting appeal? Why does he - among all the philosophers and scientists of the 20th century - continue to have such a loyal following? Name a single cybernetician or epistomologist who is commonly cited in contemporary philosphical thinking.
Answer: there are none. So the bigger question is not why Bateson is popular, but why systems thinking (of which Bateson was a practitioner) is so absent from American academia. That fact is an indictment of something, but is certainly is not Gregory Bateson.
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Title: Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity (Advances in Systems Theory, Complexity, and the Human Sciences) by Gregory Bateson ISBN: 1572734345 Publisher: Hampton Pr Pub. Date: August, 2002 List Price(USD): $23.95 |
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Title: Tree of Knowledge by Humberto R. Maturana ISBN: 0877736421 Publisher: Shambhala Pub. Date: 31 March, 1992 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
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Title: Pragmatics of Human Communication: A Study of Interactional Patterns, Pathologies, and Paradoxes by Paul Watzlawick ISBN: 0393010090 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: March, 1967 List Price(USD): $27.00 |
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Title: Angels Fear : Towards an Epistemology of the Sacred by Gregory Bateson, Mary Catherine Bateson ISBN: 0553345818 Publisher: Bantam Pub. Date: 01 October, 1988 List Price(USD): $9.95 |
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Title: General System Theory: Foundations, Development, Applications by Ludwig, Von Bertalanffy, Ludwig Von Bartalanffy, Ludwig Von Bertalanffy ISBN: 0807604534 Publisher: George Braziller Pub. Date: March, 1976 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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