Solaris

Serla grāmatas "Mind" viena no apakšņodaļām saucas "Descartes and other disasters". Tildes sniegtais tulkojums vārdam "disaster" ir 'posts', 'nelaime', 'katastrofa'. Kembridžas vārdnīca dod miermīlīgāku un varētu pateikt ironiskāku skaidrojumu - "a very bad situation, especially something that causes a lot of harm or damage" un "something that is a failure or negative result".

Minētās nodaļas pirmie teikumi ir visnotaļ ironiski un ar zināmu humora piedevu, kas ir visnotaļ raksturīga t.s. analītiskās filozofijas pazīme, lai gan Serls sniedz arī pamatojumu, kāpēc filozofiem būtu jāinteresējas par filozofijas vēsturi:

"In philosophy there is no escaping history. Ideally, I sometimes think, I would just like to tell my students the truth about a question and send them home. But such a totally unhistorical approach tends to produce philosophical superficiality. We have to know how it came about historically that we have the questions we do and what sorts of answers our ancestors gave to these questions. The philosophy of mind in the modern era effectively begins with the work of Rene Descartes (1596-1650). Descartes was not the first person to hold views of the kind he did, but his view of the mind was the most influential of the so-called modern philosophers, the philosophers of the seventeenth centuary, and after. Many of his views are routinely expounded, and uncritically accepted today by people who cannot even pronounce his name. Descartes' most famous doctrine is dualism, the idea that the world divides into two different kinds of substances or entities that can exist on their own. These are mental substances and physical substances. Descartes' form of dualism is sometimes called "substance dualism"."(8.-9.pp.)

Atceros, bakalaura studiju laikā biju iecerējis rakstīt bakalaura darbu par Serlu un Vitgenšteinu, bet, šķiet, ja vien nekļūdos, Jurģis Šķilters mani no tā atrunāja kā mazakatuālas tēmas. Tā nu uzrakstīju par kognitīvās filozofijas izpratni par metaforu.