Your Book Review: The Educated Mind
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
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The Origins of Literacy
Tyler Cowan: Literacy seems to open up the human capacity for decontextualized abstract logical thinking, even when we're not reading or writing. Is that what caused the Greek miracle, the advent of writing? He says egan thinks we find it in the emotion laden, unsystematic, wonder-struck kind of writing that he says spread through Greece in the early years of the Greek miracle. Cowan: This looks for all the world like a mashup of mythic and philosophic understanding. We might expect that the secret sauce is in the quick transition from oral tradition to writing. There's something missing.
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