Volume 31, Number 14 · September 27, 1984
Hole in the World
By Jerome S. Bruner
A Leg to Stand On
by Oliver Sacks
Summit Books, 222 pp., $14.95
Neurologists lead philosophically confounded professional lives—by necessity rather than choice. No other profession is so implacably condemned to dwell in that restless and prismatic space that lies between body and mind. If to the philosopher the mind–body problem is a playground for fancy analytic footwork, for the neurologist, it is a dilemma that compels the same kind of awesome respect that the mariner feels for the sea. For there is a compelling contradiction in any enterprise that, on the one hand, must diagnose highly subjective, introspective states, and, on the other, must locate the 'causes' of these states and narratives in the objective world of brain tracts, nuclei, tissue bundles, Brodmann areas, and the rest. When Descartes located the soul in the pineal gland (the only unpaired structure in the brain) and argued that it must be so, because the soul too is unitary, he was only playing a hyperbolic version of the neurologist's game.
Review, 3379 words
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