Straw Dogs - a Straw Man

I have finally got round to reading John Gray's Straw Dogs. Well, when I say "read", I mean I scrabbled through the first few chapters in a packed cafe over a pannini and crisps, whilst I should have been doing the Christmas shopping, but that, sadly, is generally what I mean by the verb "to read" nowadays.

I was extremely relieved to get back home to find that Norm had coincidentally, reassuringly and devastatingly blogged here on some other pronouncements by the same author, since I was beginning to wonder if it was me or the author who had taken leave of our senses. Prof. Gray is after all some sort of a bigwig at the LSE and, well you know, I didn't get past a BA.

Generally I am getting the feeling that it isn't me who is losing it after all. The book really is packed with non-sequiturs, false analogies, straightforward denials of what appear to be more truth-like theories, together with a consistent, cheap and dialectically redundant propensity to attack his pet-hate theories in their poorest forms. Given that he apparently now directs his fiercest scorn "to the disciples of rationalism and of science", I suppose these kinds of irrational criticism shouldn't come as too much of a surprise, but it does rather beg the question of why he bothered to write and publish a book if he hadn't assumed that others out there might involve themselves in a rational and truth seeking exercise called reading?"

Will come back to this, am sure.