Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Korzybski: A Biography

Korzybski: A Biography

Kodish, Bruce I.

Hardcover

PhilosophyBiographies GeneralGeneral World History

ISBN10: 0970066422
ISBN13: 9780970066428
Publisher: Extensional Publishing
Published: Jul 3 2011
Pages: 694
Weight: 2.85
Height: 1.44 Width: 6.69 Depth: 9.61
Language: English

That's a crazy book! Albert Einstein said in the early 1950s, when asked his impression of Alfred Korzybski's 1933 work Science and Sanity. More than a decade later, Richard Feynman found Korzybski's notion of time-binding crucial for answering the question What is science?. Feynman didn't know that it was Alfred Korzybski who had coined the term time-binding in his first, 1921, book Manhood of Humanity to label what he considered the defining characteristic of humans: the potential of each generation to start where the former leaves off and thus to accumulate useful knowledge at an ever-accelerating rate. In the exact sciences and technology, time-binding seems to work reasonably well. In the rest of human life, not so much. Korzybski, a patriotic Polish nobleman and an engineer who had lived under Tsarist tyranny and had seen the horrors of World War I on the Eastern Front before coming to the United States, realized the results of the disparity between rapid but narrow scientific-technological advancement and broader but snail-paced ethical-social development: a seemingly endless cycle of crises, revolutions and wars. Seeking a way out, he studied a broad range of disciplines from physics to psychiatry-fields that others felt had little to do with each other-and discovered factors of sanity in physico-mathematical methods. Comparing the ways of thinking that scientists and mathematicians exemplify when working at their best and the ways of thinking that they and other people unsanely or insanely tend to use the rest of the time, Korzybski linked science and sanity in a new world outlook with an accompanying methodology (labeled 'general semantics')-simple enough to teach children. Some people considered him a genius; others considered him a crank. Here's the life story of the man who said The map is not the territory.

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