The MLA convention: interviews, fear and trembling, publish or perish, cutbacks, no vacancies, ‘literary theorists are the snappiest dressers’.… Read the rest
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Never Mind Offensive, Is It True?
Dec 31st, 2002 5:42 pm | By Ophelia BensonThere is an interesting comment on the letters page of the New York Times Science section.
The conversation with David Sloan Wilson quotes him as saying, “I tell people I’m an atheist, but a nice atheist” (“The Origins of Religion, From a Distinctly Darwinian View”). The idea that atheists, secular humanists, agnostics and other free thinkers are not “nice” or, as is often more bluntly put, “cannot be moral without a belief in God” is highly offensive to the millions of Americans who are nonbelievers.
I entirely agree with the basic thought, but I would have phrased it a little differently. (Plus, in Wilson’s defense, I think he is reacting to the prejudices of other people, not expressing his own.) … Read the rest
Research on Free Will
Dec 31st, 2002 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
Is it an empirical question rather than a philosophical one?… Read the rest
Paradigm Shift in Progress?
Dec 31st, 2002 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
Physicists disagree about revisions to special relativity.… Read the rest
Claim Anything
Dec 30th, 2002 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
Rael ‘once claimed that he travelled by flying saucer in 1975 to share lunch with Jesus, Buddha and Confucius’ and now claims to have cloned a human.… Read the rest
Undue Burden Indeed
Dec 30th, 2002 1:00 am | By Ophelia BensonHere is a review of what sounds like a very strange book by a ‘New Democrat’ (i.e. a Democrat so conservative he might as well be a Republican) and adviser to Clinton named William Galston. He wraps himself in the cloak of Isaiah Berlin, the reviewer Stephen Macedo wittily remarks, in an effort to make a case for ‘value pluralism’; but it sounds more like Balkanization and desecularization. Particularly bizarre and indeed alarming is the fact that he condemns the U.S. Supreme Court for striking down the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which was written so broadly as to give religious groups the ability to challenge any law that imposed an ‘undue burden’.
The review is particulary sharp with the all-too … Read the rest
A Skeptical Look at ‘Diversity Liberalism’
Dec 29th, 2002 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
A New Democrat thinks the US doesn’t pander to religion enough.… Read the rest
The Great Age of the Big Notion
Dec 29th, 2002 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
The Lonely Crowd was one of a crowd of Big Idea books that were long on speculation but short on evidence.… Read the rest
Separation of Politics and Science
Dec 28th, 2002 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
Daniel Smith reviews Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate in The Boston Globe.… Read the rest
Meet Me at the Volcano
Dec 28th, 2002 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
A sportswriter and race car driver discovers aliens speak French, starts new religion.… Read the rest
Raelian Bishop Announces Cloned Human
Dec 27th, 2002 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
Clonaid, connected to Raelian sect who say aliens created all life on Earth through genetic engineering, claims it has followed suit.… Read the rest
Do We Define Ourselves By Way of our Tastes?
Dec 26th, 2002 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
Red wine or white? Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter? (Hang on, where is ‘neither’?)… Read the rest
Open the Door
Dec 24th, 2002 11:25 pm | By Ophelia BensonThis is an essay that talks (among other things) about the convergence of two subjects (if not more) that keep coming up here: the fashion for biographies of intellectuals–poets, philosophers, historians, scientists–that dwell lovingly on prurient personal details and skip lightly over the ideas and thought and books that are why the people are interesting to begin with; and the dominance of identity politics over every other kind.
… Read the restThe fixation on biography, particularly when it is mixed with interpretive suspicion, suggests a retreat from philosophy’s aspiration to truth; we wallow in the particular and revel in salacious detail, whether it be Wittgenstein’s homosexuality, A. J. Ayer’s promiscuity, Foucault’s “sadomasochistic” experimentations in the gay subculture, Dewey’s sexual shyness, or Hannah Arendt’s
Gossip Displaces Ideas
Dec 24th, 2002 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
Shallow misunderstandings of Arendt, Heidegger, Foucault and others by writers more interested in laundry-inspection than analysis of thought.… Read the rest
Is Religion Adaptive?
Dec 24th, 2002 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
Perhaps, or perhaps it’s a spandrel or a virus, instead, says biologist David Sloan Wilson.… Read the rest
Catholics Here, Protestants There, Please
Dec 24th, 2002 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
Plan being considered to split Scottish school into two, one Protestant one Catholic, has local people worried.… Read the rest
Quantum Foolery
Dec 23rd, 2002 7:53 pm | By Ophelia BensonHere is a very silly essay from Slate. Note the rhetoric, for one thing, the talk of atheists ‘trumpeting’ their beliefs, and the truculent demand for an explanation, as if atheism required more explanation than theism does. Note the failure to define what is meant by ‘God’. Note the default assumption that belief is normal and that it’s unbelief that requires justification. Note the circularity of the argument that non-believers have some ‘splaining to do because Garry Wills doesn’t agree with them. And note the resort to the often-cited ‘cosmic deists’ such as Paul Davies. Holt doesn’t trouble to point out that Davies is very much in a minority among physicists in drawing deist conclusions from his work. And … Read the rest
Competing Goods
Dec 23rd, 2002 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
Should conservation trump treaty rights, or the other way around?… Read the rest
Confused about a Virgin?
Dec 22nd, 2002 8:46 pm | By Ophelia BensonConfused and unfounded guesswork. Crude and offensive speculation.
So says the RC Bishop of Portsmouth, the Right Reverend Crispian Hollis, about a BBC documentary focussing on the life of The Virgin Mary.
But, alas, the really not right at all, Mr Hollis, is not talking about the nonsense of the virgin birth, the resurrection, Angels, wise men and talking snakes, but rather the questioning of these things.
Confusion indeed.… Read the rest
Fundamentalists and Flexibles
Dec 22nd, 2002 7:06 pm | By Ophelia BensonRhetoric everywhere. You can’t let your guard down for an instant, no rest for the wicked, hypervigilance is the price of accuracy, and so on. Just tweak one or two little words and you can guide your readers so very subtly in what they’re meant to think, without having to come right out and tell them. This is a story from the Observer about genetics.
… Read the restThe nature versus nurture debate revived from the Sixties, when it had revolved around IQ and had bitter, racial overtones. This time around, it was less to do with race but no less bitter, with genetic fundamentalists such as Steven Pinker and Richard Dawkins arguing that ‘the answer lies in our genes’. Opponents, such as