More on that Eagleton review. I have my doubts about other parts of it.

For mainstream Christianity, reason, argument and honest doubt have always played an integral role in belief.

Well, for one thing, that depends how you define mainstream Christianity (and I’m not too sure about that ‘always,’ either, in fact I think it’s wrong – for most of mainstream Christianity’s history, honest doubt has damn well not played an integral role, but led straight to the nice hot bonfire). For another thing, it could be seen as a contradiction to say that doubt plays an integral role in belief. For another thing, Eagleton doesn’t do a great job of modelling honest doubt himself.

He is what sustains

I was stopped cold by a paragraph in Terry Eagleton’s review of Dawkins’s book in the LRB (it’s subscription, so I can’t link to it; a kind reader sent me a copy). I’ll show you why.

Dawkins on God is rather like those right-wing Cambridge dons who filed eagerly into the Senate House some years ago to non-placet Jacques Derrida for an honorary degree. Very few of them, one suspects, had read more than a few pages of his work, and even that judgment might be excessively charitable. Yet they would doubtless have been horrified to receive an essay on Hume from a student who had not read his Treatise of Human Nature.

Staggering, isn’t it? One suspects – one … Read the rest

Catherine Bennett notes that the Rational Dress Society protested against dress fashion that ‘impedes the movements of the body’ with the result that after three or four decades, women were able to ride bicycles. Well, yes. Clothes and dress codes seem like a comparatively trivial matter, but they’re not. They’re immensely important. I’ve felt that literally all my life – from earliest earliest childhood. I always wore jeans when I could, I always fought wearing a skirt whether for school or for social occasions, I always fought binding or uncomfortable clothes. I remember fussing (okay probably whining) about a dress that was too tight or pinchy somewhere when I was a child; my mother said something to the effect that … Read the rest

Sorry – a couple of people have reproached me for linking to Nagel on Dawkins when it’s subscription. Sorry. I got access via bugmenot (which will probably now be taken away) a long time ago, so I forget that it’s subscription. I thought it might be on the Dawkins site but it isn’t, at least not yet. Try bugmenot – it doesn’t always work, but it sometimes does. It’s cheating, but then again, one can read magazines at libraries, and that’s not cheating.

It’s worth the effort (no surprise there).

One of Dawkins’s aims is to overturn the convention of respect toward religion that belongs to the etiquette of modern civilization. He does this by persistently violating the convention, and

One the other hand – to be fair – Lakoff disputes Pinker’s review and says it says he says the opposite of what he says.… Read the rest

Steven Pinker gets off some good zingers at George Lakoff.

If Lakoff is right, his theory can do everything from overturning millennia of misguided thinking in the Western intellectual tradition to putting a Democrat in the White House…Conceptual metaphor, according to Lakoff, shows that all thought is based on unconscious physical metaphors, with beliefs determined by the metaphors in which ideas are framed. Cognitive science has also shown that thinking depends on emotion, and that a person’s rationality is bounded by limitations of attention and memory. Together these discoveries undermine, in Lakoff’s view, the Western ideal of conscious, universal, and dispassionate reason based on logic, facts, and a fit to reality. Philosophy, then, is not an extended debate about