So here we are again. Where? Here. Where we were a little more than a year ago. In the land of post-partum depression or separation anxiety or what do you think this is, a hotel?. In short, we’ve finished another book. Your well-meaning if surly and inelegant hosts have written another book, which includes the process of finishing writing another book. We have put words down on screen, one after another, patiently piling Pelion on Ossa, except on those days when we opted to pile Ossa on Pelion; one after another, I tell you, until after awhile, after a week or two or three, we had a whole paragraph. Then hey! no sooner had we caught our breath than … Read the rest
Darkness as Far as the Eye Can See
May 25th, 2005 8:16 pm | By Ophelia BensonAre you all familiar with the Darkness at El Dorado affair? Remember that? The book that exposed a putative scandal in the world of anthropology? Except the putative scandal was – well, let us say it was not well-supported by the evidence. But we all know how that goes. The ‘exposure’ of the ‘scandal’ is front-page news and a best-seller, while the later exposure of the fact that the ‘scandal’ was something more in the nature of a good old mud-throwing exercise is confined to academic journals where most people never hear of it. So that in fact the people who set off the whole mess to a considerable extent got what they wanted. In short, a miscarriage of justice.… Read the rest
Mark Your Calendars for Mega Conference
May 25th, 2005 | Filed by Ophelia Benson‘World’s greatest minds’ to meet in Lynchburg for creationist jamboree.… Read the rest
Evolution Based not on Science but Ideology
May 25th, 2005 | Filed by Ophelia BensonCreationists are scientists and biologists peddle fairytales.… Read the rest
Why Lee Smith’s Doorman Ate His Homework
May 25th, 2005 | Filed by Ophelia BensonDangerous to invest artifacts with too much metaphysical significance.… Read the rest
Enough With the Moist and Sympathetic Treatment
May 25th, 2005 | Filed by Ophelia BensonWestern cringe in face of intolerance of others best corrected by serious Muslims.… Read the rest
Anthropology and the Enemy Within
May 25th, 2005 | Filed by Ophelia BensonWhat’s wrong with AAA report? A riptide of political righteousness.… Read the rest
Hitchens on That Johns Hopkins Guide
May 24th, 2005 | Filed by Ophelia BensonNo Orwell or Ayer or Gellner. Well of course not.… Read the rest
Darkness at American Anthropological Association
May 24th, 2005 | Filed by Ophelia BensonWas AAA report on allegations against Neel and Chagnon unfair?… Read the rest
John Banville Reviews Simon Blackburn on Truth
May 24th, 2005 | Filed by Ophelia BensonLess a guide for the perplexed than a guided tour through philosophical perplexities. … Read the rest
Dawkins’ ‘Creationism: God’s gift to the ignorant’
May 24th, 2005 | Filed by Ophelia BensonAttacks creationists’ lack of logic and ‘deceitful misquoting.’ [pdf]… Read the rest
Most Reform Candidates Blocked in Iran
May 24th, 2005 | Filed by Ophelia BensonRuling clerics seek to consolidate their power in the June 17 vote.… Read the rest
Hurrah for Old-Time Atheism
May 24th, 2005 2:17 am | By Ophelia BensonWell…call me delusional, call me hasty (call me a cab, call me for dinner, yeah yeah, I know), but I can’t help wondering if Salman Rushdie has been reading B&W, at least once. I started with surprise when I started reading this article.
… Read the rest“Not believing in God is no excuse for being virulently anti-religious or naïvely pro-science,” says Dylan Evans, a professor of robotics at the University of West England in Bristol…Evans’ position fits well with that of the American philosopher of science Michael Ruse, whose new book, The Evolution-Creation Struggle, lays much of the blame for the growth of creationism in America — and for the increasingly strident attempts by the religious right to have evolutionary theory
Salman Rushdie Agrees With B&W
May 23rd, 2005 | Filed by Ophelia BensonThat Dylan Evans and Michael Ruse get both atheism and religion wrong.… Read the rest
A Struggle, a Struggle, and a Struggle
May 23rd, 2005 | Filed by Ophelia BensonThe fight for women’s rights in Iraq.… Read the rest
Jonathan Rée on Paul Ricoeur
May 23rd, 2005 | Filed by Ophelia BensonAim was to teach us to feel full force of authentic intellectual discomfort. … Read the rest
Bogus Outrage at Penguin: ‘It Just Won’t Do’
May 23rd, 2005 | Filed by Ophelia BensonPitching a tedious fit about putative shortage of black authors.… Read the rest
Spin Doctors as Shy as Water Voles
May 23rd, 2005 | Filed by Ophelia Benson‘In The Thick Of It’ doesn’t describe today’s New Labour all that well.… Read the rest
Rahila Khan and Toby Forward
May 23rd, 2005 2:51 am | By Ophelia BensonMore teasing of the Literary ‘what did I just say?’ Theory mafia, thanks to another link-donation by Allen Esterson. Terry Eagleton was doing his bit all the way back in 1999 – surely before After Theory was even a file on Eagelton’s computer.
… Read the restGayatri Spivak remarks with some justification in this book that a good deal of US post-colonial theory is ‘bogus’, but this gesture is de rigueur when it comes to one post-colonial critic writing about the rest. Besides, for a ‘Third World’ theorist to break this news to her American colleagues is in one sense deeply unwelcome, and in another sense exactly what they want to hear. Nothing is more voguish in guilt-ridden US academia than to point
Paul Ricoeur
May 22nd, 2005 | Filed by Ophelia Benson‘The entire European humanist tradition is mourning one of its most talented spokesmen.’… Read the rest