(05-07-2017, 10:08 AM)VViews Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.On the Guardian website:
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
Thank you, VViews! From this article, the book seems more interesting than I initially though. I still have several perplexities (but I don't know how reliable the article is in giving an idea of the book).
Personally, I think that an analysis that completely ignores the linguistic side is unverifiable and cannot really move research forward. I greatly enjoy speculating about the nice pictures, but I don't believe that this can lead to conclusions as specific as those published by Skinner. The "problem that has frustrated academics, cryptographers and computer programming experts" since 1912 (and before) is how to read the book, not just having a more or less precise identification of who wrote it.
Some of the statements in the article seem to me correct and relevant, e.g.:
"in those days, doctors had to be astrologers as well, so they could determine the nature of an illness and treatment."
But the proposed interpretation is one of many possibilities, so I disagree with statements like:
“I think there is no other explanation for what they are: it is either rank fantasy by the author – which doesn’t really fit with the medical, herbal and cosmological sections of the manuscript – or it is a mikvah.” My opinion is that, at the current stage of our knowledge, an open mind is the best possible approach. The "mikvah" may be a good hypothesis, but mixing religious ritual baths with other medical, secular, sections doesn't seem to me to be obviously better than other alternatives (e.g. "regular" medical baths as discussed by Touwaide). The concept of "rank fantasy" seems to me both generic and dismissive, a convenient straw-man: I see no point in comparing a specific hypothesis with something like that. I hope this is just a simplification introduced for the aritcle and that the the book compares Skinner's ideas about the "bathing nymphs" with actual different hypotheses, such as that put forward by You are not allowed to view links.
Register or
Login to view..