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Bezig met laden... The Book of the Damned (1919)door Charles Fort
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Meld je aan bij LibraryThing om erachter te komen of je dit boek goed zult vinden. Op dit moment geen Discussie gesprekken over dit boek. Some people dismiss Fort as an unscientific crank, some people embrace him whole-heartedly as a reporter of the paranormal, others just love him as a champion of the ABnormal. I like his language - wch may generally go undercommented on as people pay more attn to the more spectacular "Fortean" phenomena described. I find Fort's language to be EXTREMELY CAREFUL in its attempt to NOT BE DEFINITIVE & it's in this that, for me, therein lies Fort's extreme importance. It's not just that he stresses that scientists are capable of ignoring data/experiences that fall outside 'convenient' &/or 'consensus' 'reality', it's also that Fort describes things in such a way that's both expressive of & CONDUCIVE TO a state-of-mind of CONTINUAL QUESTIONING. Bravo! ( ) In the fictional world of the TV show The X-Files, I can imagine this book being in Fox Mulders' library. It purports to be is a list of occurrences and UFO sightings that have been damned - that is, excluded from history - because there are no satisfactory scientific explanations for these incidents. Published in 1919, long before the Age of Space Travel, Charles Fort's major premise was that other worlds or entities, undetected by humanity, lurked nearby in the heavens, even closer than the Moon. The money sentence from this tedious book (Boni & Liveright, 2nd printing, 1920 as found at Google Books) by Charles Fort is found on page 252: "I think that we're fished for." This sentence, made famous by William Gaddis in his masterful novel THE RECOGNITIONS where characters discuss Fort's ideas as part of an intellectual conversation taking place at a post-WWII social gathering in Manhattan, is Fort's humorous retort to an August 27, 1885 UFO sighting where a "'strange object in the clouds'" was reported to resemble a "triangular shape, and seemed to be about the size of a pilot-boat mainsail, with chains attached to the bottom of it." Fort wonders if there was "something [alien life] trawling overhead" fishing for humans below. As it turns out, the object was most likely a partially collapsed balloon. As an impressive catalog of strange objects reported to have fallen to the ground since 1700 A.D., and as a collection of widely-scattered witticisms from Fort in his commentary upon these strange objects, this book retains some value, but don't expect much entertainment. The classic work that prompted Ben Hecht to coin the term "Fortean". Charles Fort was a great collector of quirky newspaper stories about strange phenenomena. He was acutely aware of the human habit of consigning to oblivion strange stories with no ready explanation. But Fort was not one of those credulous UFO-geeks who sees cover-up and conspiracy in every failure to confirm his belief in extraterrestrials. Rather he was an open-minded man who sought honest inquiry in response to the facts, no matter how baffling. geen besprekingen | voeg een bespreking toe
Is opgenomen inThe Fortean Collection door Charles Fort (indirect)
This careful, exhaustive, often astonishing chronicle of anomalous phenomena dismissed by conventional science is Charles Fort's groundbreaking foray into the field of "weird science." Fort looked at science as a dogmatic attempt to explain phenomena in prefabricated and often constrictive terms. It was the anomalies, the excluded, or what Fort called "the damned" at the fringes of science that offered the most intriguing windows to the future of human insight. To tweak stodgy scientists, Fort's Book of the Damned recounts hundreds of strange situations that he felt eluded scientific explanation-from black rain to six-legged lambs-many of which were reported in mainstream scientific publications of the time. Scientists, he asserted, often argued according to their own beliefs rather than the rules of evidence and ignored inconvenient facts that conflicted with their preferred theories. In this view he anticipated some of the arguments that Thomas Kuhn would later advance in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. While holding the distinct position of being called both an enemy of science and an enemy of dogma, Fort challenged the "closed minds" of established scientists and created a popular classic that has inspired legions of admirers. Geen bibliotheekbeschrijvingen gevonden. |
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Google Books — Bezig met laden... GenresDewey Decimale Classificatie (DDC)001.94Information Computing and Information Knowledge Controversial knowledge MysteriesLC-classificatieWaarderingGemiddelde:
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