I liked this article on the sense of smell. It made me think, as the saying goes.

Mine is a mediocre specimen of a post-lapsarian nose. As a fallen daughter of Eve—or, more accurately, a fallen granddaughter of a sharp-nosed chimpanzee—I am conscious of smell only a few times each day…But for most of the day, it is unusual for me to notice any particular smells. I do eat food, of course, but with the illusory impression that I am tasting rather than smelling the myriad different flavours that make up even an ordinary meal.

Yes, same here, I suppose; but I do value smells, I thought to myself. Then later in the day when I was outside, I … Read the rest

That pope – he’s always walking into these things. He’s like one of those physical comedy types whose schtick is all tripping over the furniture and sitting on the cat.

Apparently there was this fuss in Italy the other day ‘when the daily newspaper of the Italian Roman Catholic church criticised a string of recent satirical acts’ about this same pope. The pope’s private secretary explained to a journalist what the papal crowd was thinking.

“I am aware of the controversy and I hope that broadcasts of this kind stop,” Father Genswein said. “Satire is fine. But these things do not have any intellectual quality and offend men of the church. They are not acceptable.”

That’s fun, isn’t it? … Read the rest

Something from an essay by Richard Rorty – ‘Globalization, the Politics of Identity and Social Hope,’ in Philosophy and Social Hope (1996). See what you think.

As I see it, the emergence of feminism, gay liberation, various sorts of ethnic separatism, aboriginal rights, and the like, simply add further concreteness to sketches of the good old egalitarian utopia…In that society, people who wanted to think of themselves as Basque first, or black first, or women first, and citizens of their countries or a global cooperative commonwealth second, would have little trouble doing so. For the institutions of that commonwealth would be regulated by John Stuart Mill’s dictum that everybody gets to do what they like as long as it doesn’t