Alfred Korzybski – Science And Sanity

Customer Excerpt:”In his book, Science and Sanity, Alfred Korzybski succeeds in presenting to his readers a distillation of many seemingly diverse branches of knowledge, including: Anthropology, Biology, Education, Logic, Mathematics, Neurology, Physics, Physiology, Psychiatry, Semantics, etc.Specialists in the above mentioned disciplines may be disappointed or even insulted at Korzybski’s general, integrative style. However, Korzybski was mainly concerned about extracting the aspects of the above mentioned disciplines that have the most human value. Korzybski’s attitude was definitely NOT “science for science’s sake.” Instead, he sought to integrate diverse branches of knowledge into a system that would be simple enough to teach to young children, so that each young child would begin life with the knowledge and wisdom that took the human race centuries of labor to achieve. Of course, if this goal could actually be achieved, the progression and survival of the human race would be greatly enhanced!Although Science and Sanity is certainly a difficult book to read and understand, Korzybski’s system can be easily taught to young children. The reason for this is that Korzybski summarized his system as a non-verbal diagram. Probably, the wisdom of thousands of books are represented non-verbally on that diagram!It’s true that one must know what the different parts of the diagram represent in order to appreciate or understand it; however, Korzybski’s system is certainly unique in that one can explain the system to another while referring (pointing) to a diagram. This visual aid, called the Structural Differential, could be used in the education of young children as a way of simply and easily imparting “the wisdom of the ages.”Note: Science and Sanity uses some abbreviations throughout the book. There are charts on pages 15 and 16 that explain these. Don’t miss those charts, or you’ll miss the whole book!”Get smart.-skullfucj