Courtesy of Rob Newman
For a show that promises a comedy romp through two-and-a-half thousand years of thought, the opening gambit of Total Eclipse of Descartes recalls the punchline to the old joke: 鈥淚 wouldn鈥檛 start from here鈥. Forget “I think, therefore I am”; Robert Newman wants to talk about the work of a largely forgotten professor of psychology who helped to invent the grammar school.
Ah, yes, Cyril Burt, head of psychology at University College London from 1931 to 1950. Rarely mentioned in the same breath as Descartes, but when Newman begins to spin his yarn you quickly start to see…
