Author: Ophelia Benson

‘We no longer defer to bishops or politicians; scientists are simply facing the same fate.’ Yes but bishops are one thing and scientists are another. We can demand that scientists produce evidence, but what evidence can a bishop offer?

No it’s not just an accident that the character who gets Tom Hanks killed in Saving Private Ryan is both an intellectual and a coward. Spielberg is making a point, a bad point, and we need to pay attention.

In their ‘paranoiac and demonological theology of science’ Lewontin, Kamin and Rose fire both barrels with equal monotony and imprecision: ‘determinism’ and ‘reductionism’. But the gallant little fire brigade has perpetrated a fatuous little book.

Psychoanalysis was never, despite Freud’s ‘positivist rhetoric,’ a science; it was a ‘purely speculative enterprise,’ argues Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen.

What is the difference between genuine inquiry and the sham and fake variety?

Dowsing, homeopathy, Tarot cards and their relevance to mental health professions, and, of course, alien abductions.

Do scientists ‘keep the faith’ and if so is that a good thing? Is religion a good source of morality?

What is a government department doing endorsing the idea that traditions and myths count as evidence?

Why did it take the US Senate forty years to ratify the UN Genocide Convention?

The shift from logic to history, and the perennial appeal of irrationalist programs.

No, linear doesn’t mean what pomos think it means.

‘Anthropologists are trained to appreciate cultural differences, but they can’t stand it within their own profession.’

‘Mathematics is absolutely integrated with Western civilization, which conquered and dominated the entire world.’

Centrality is so uncool that the margins are as full of people as Bangkok or the Aran Islands.

Beware of neo-Deistic pseudoreligion.

‘…all but a fraction of his own writing molders unattended in America’s used bookstores. Like the New York Intellectuals with whom he was associated…he is referenced more often than read, a sad fate for a critic who wrote so much, so well and with such wit and insight.’

‘…many of the widely accepted claims promulgated by therapists are based on subjective clinical opinions and have been resoundingly disproved by empirical research conducted by psychological scientists.’

‘But the gender-genre books that are based largely on clinical intuition and popular psychology typically lack a basic skepticism toward received wisdom and the willingness to wrestle with an idea to see who wins.’

Consider Will Crooks, Labour MP. ‘Growing up in extreme poverty…Crooks spent 2d. on a secondhand Iliad, and was dazzled…’

Literary criticism, cultural studies; love letter and satire.