Jonathan Reé reviews Dawkins’ new book: ‘Dawkins campaigns against superstition with the blind fervour of a religious fanatic.’ Good; too bad there aren’t more like him.… Read the rest
All entries by this author
Merton Obituary in New York Times 
Feb 25th, 2003 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
Role models and self-fulfilling prophecies and ‘an extraordinary range of interests that included the workings of the mass media, the anatomy of racism, the social perspectives of “insiders” vs. “outsiders,” history, literature and etymology.’… Read the rest
Robert Merton
Feb 25th, 2003 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
Obituary of innovative sociologist of science.… Read the rest
News Flash: Enlightenment Hostile to Religion
Feb 25th, 2003 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
A new book on the Enlightenment’s near-obsession with Judaism is a cautionary tale against ‘the seductions of rationalist absolutism.’ What of the seductions of irrationalism?… Read the rest
Are We Like Sheep
Feb 24th, 2003 11:55 pm | By Ophelia BensonBy way of addendum to my Note & Comment of yesterday, here is the essay ‘Dolly and the Cloth-heads’ that Richard Dawkins and others discussed on ‘Start the Week’. The subject is one that has interested and annoyed me for a long time. For instance when I read Stephen Jay Gould’s strange little book Rocks of Ages in which he, very oddly it seemed to me, simply took it for granted that the way to carve up the world between science and religion is that science should tell us the facts about the world and religion should tell us about morals. What a very peculiar assumption. Also a very common one, to be sure, but not well-founded; I don’t expect … Read the rest
On Channel 1 Tonight: Junior Threatens Teacher
Feb 24th, 2003 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
Parents don’t believe their children behave badly in school, so one plan is to use CCTV and then show them the evidence.… Read the rest
Watered-down Math Books
Feb 24th, 2003 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
Teach history by all means, but don’t de-emphasize deductive reasoning and mathematical proofs.… Read the rest
Genes, Yanks, Ethics
Feb 23rd, 2003 5:09 pm | By Ophelia BensonWhen I have an odd moment, or forty five of them, I listen to archived editions of BBC Radio 4’s Start the Week. Yesterday I listened to this one from February 10, with Richard Dawkins and Janet Radcliffe Richards, as well as Robert Harvey and, finally extricated from a traffic jam, Andrew Roberts. This is a highly interesting show which touches on a number of issues we are interested in at B and W. Just for one thing, we get to hear Andrew Marr tell Richard Dawkins ‘You’re not a genetic determinist, are you,’ and Dawkins reply that he’s long been plugging that line: that the way we have evolved does not determine the way we have to be. … Read the rest
Susan Sontag is not a Postmodernist
Feb 23rd, 2003 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
‘Even as her early criticism anticipates every academic trend from Cultural Studies to Queer Theory, she has been resolute in her resistance to everything postmodern, insisting on standards, morals and distinctions and the authority of art, experience and truth.’… Read the rest
Women Are Mediocre
Feb 23rd, 2003 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
Oh dear, how depressing. We have fewer stars and fewer total failures; we bunch up in the middle.… Read the rest
Richard Dawkins Answers Questions
Feb 23rd, 2003 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
On poltergeists, the tooth fairy, God-shaped holes, surprise arrivals at Pearly Gates, and 42.… Read the rest
How Many Kinds of Truth Are There?
Feb 23rd, 2003 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
Does the CIA know it when it sees it? Do UN inspectors? Truth commissions? Journalists, spies?… Read the rest
Down With Indifference
Feb 22nd, 2003 9:09 pm | By Ophelia BensonThere’s been an interesting convergence lately of worry about passion and its absence, detachment and its dangers, or on the other hand about the intrusiveness and intolerance of passion and engagement. The two stances – passion and dispassion – have been exemplified in two thinkers: Richard Dawkins and Louis Menand.
David Bromwich took Louis Menand to task in the New Republic in January for his lack of a ruling passion or driving enthusiasm, excitement or anger, for being too easily unimpressed, too cool, too responsible and distant.
… Read the restThe idea of a radical break in thought is alien to Menand. The leveling of distinctions also serves as an intellectual labor-saving device. Nothing is very new; nothing, maybe, ever was; nothing matters
What Working Class?
Feb 22nd, 2003 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
No fantasy is too extreme when one wants to build some luxury flats.… Read the rest
A Devil’s Chaplain Reviewed
Feb 21st, 2003 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
Kenan Malik says ‘an obsessive concern with reason seems to me to be a virtue not a vice.’… Read the rest
Ringing Tone Provokes Suspicion
Feb 21st, 2003 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
John Gray reviews Daniel Dennett’s Freedom Evolves, and says the obsession with freedom is a leftover from Christianity.… Read the rest
Passions Rule
Feb 21st, 2003 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
Scholars in different fields are looking at emotion. (The list of books at the end of this article inexplicably omits Simon Blackburn’s Ruling Passions.)… Read the rest
Orwell Again
Feb 20th, 2003 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
Hitchens, Menand, Wieseltier go to buffets over the Meaning of Orwell.… Read the rest
Analogies Don’t Work
Feb 19th, 2003 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
Historians consider various popular analogies for the Iraq situation, and point out the bad fit.… Read the rest
CHE Links on Michigan Case
Feb 18th, 2003 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
The Chronicle of Higher Education gives links to articles relevant to University of Michigan’s race-conscious admissions policies, a Supreme Court issue.… Read the rest
