Ah-a. Sandra Harding has a new book – and it does look like a corker. Happily, people are taking note, and adding it to their science studies course outlines as required reading. Splendid.

The idea of this science as value- or culture-free is pulled apart by postcolonialist analyses of the culturally distinctive ways that Western science has developed…Harding problematizes the claim to universality that Western science rests upon…This evaluation is not only presented in terms of how we might transform the scientific traditions of the “Global North”, but also how we might transform the way we study science to be more critical, reflexive, and politically-engaged.

Great. Study of science that is more politically engaged. Great idea. Of course, the Bush … Read the rest

Mark Vernon discusses what he calls ‘common mistakes of atheists’ – but the examples he gives aren’t examples, because they don’t make the mistakes he says they make. His attributions are rather sloppy. Okay very sloppy. He doesn’t quote, he just says.

If you do the rounds of the philosophically minded blogs of atheists, it is common for arguments about the non-existence of God to be rehearsed. Typically, they present ‘proofs’ that require empirical evidence. For example, Stephen Law, argues that if God is all-powerful and all-good, then the fact that there is so much evil in the world provides evidence that tilts the odds decisively against God’s existence.

But arguing that something tilts the odds is not the same … Read the rest

To be fair to Terry Eagleton, he’s perfectly capable of being entirely lucid and even (dare I say it) sensible. I leafed through The Eagelton Reader earlier today to find a sample – and it was not difficult. From an essay called ‘Deconstruction and Human Rights’:

Equivocation and ambiguity are not always moral virtues; and there seems no doubt that such finespun obliquity on issues of central political importance has done much to disillusion those erstwhile enthusiasts for deconstruction who somewhat gullibly credited its promissory note to deliver some political goods.

There you go. Clear as a bell.

Update: I shortened the quoted passage, to omit a swipe at Derrida that I almost didn’t include to begin with, but ended … Read the rest

I’m not the only one who wasn’t impressed or convinced by that piece by Stuart Jeffries. Caspar Melville is another.

Stuart Jeffries piece on faith and unbelief is an example of a certain kind of liberal intellectual position which seeks to stand above the current debates about the place of religion in contemporary society…He quotes without challenge the preposterous assertion from Colin Slee, Dean of Southwark, that “atheists like Richard Dawkins are just as fundamentalist as the people setting off bombs on the tube” (since when is writing books and making arguments comparable to mass murder?)…Jeffries is quite right to point out that these days secularists seem exasperated. But who can blame us when the case against unaccountable