The only two nice consequences of the book were a growing trend for having plants in houses and offices in the ugly cities of that time in many parts of the world, and a wonderful double LP by Steve Wonder with the same title as the book (for mysticism in the art is always less harmful than in science).
These authors attributed to plants a plentiful of spiritual capacities, supposedly arising from a mystic dimension we might share with them, and tried to persuade the reader through the description of some ‘experiments’ that easily failed to be replicable when real botanists tried to do it.
Probably, part of my feeling of certainty about my claim proceeded from the thorough and (by then) recent discredit of the ‘researches’ behind a famous best seller of the seventies, The secret life of plants (1973), by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird. Well, this is the idea now I think is wrong. We were talking about whether plants can feel, and I somehow arrogantly answered something like “that’s totally impossible plants cannot have feelings because they lack a nervous system”. The idea is one I had entertained from many years ago, but, although I don’t remember having published it ever, I recall pretty well expressing it in front of some female classmates during my first or my second year as a Philosophy undergraduate.
Anyway, you are going to be a witness of an unusual episode of a philosopher acknowledging that one of his ideas was wrong. The joke must be old enough for not taking into account expenditure in laptops or trips to congresses in exotic places, but it still has a point, perhaps. Actually, an old joke tells about a university rector saying to other that his favourite department is that of mathematics, for mathematicians only ask for paper, pencils and paper bins “oh, no!”, the other rector replies, “philosophers are much better: they only ask for paper and pencils”. It is said of philosophers that they are ever less willing to recognise a mistake than the ordinary intellect… sorry, man on the street.
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