We all need to be able to detect bogus claims, Robert Park says.… Read the rest
All entries by this author
And University Students Run Amok Too
Feb 28th, 2003 | Filed by Ophelia BensonDebt and the equation marks=money can poison the teacher-student relation.… Read the rest
What Teachers Have to Face
Feb 28th, 2003 | Filed by Ophelia BensonViolent students and low-level bad behavior drive teachers out of teaching.… Read the rest
Teachers Win a Decision
Feb 28th, 2003 | Filed by Ophelia BensonThe law lords in the UK decided teachers may refuse to teach students who have been expelled for violence then reinstated.… Read the rest
What Spinoza Knew
Feb 28th, 2003 | Filed by Ophelia BensonScientific American reviews Antonio Damasio’s Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain.… Read the rest
Made not Born
Feb 27th, 2003 8:03 pm | By Ophelia BensonI’ve been pondering this business of confusing or blurring the boundaries (see this week’s Bad Moves) between a religion and a group of people, between Judaism and Jews, Islam and Muslims, that I touched on in yesterday’s Note and Comment.
It all has to do with Identity Politics, I suppose, which is a large subject, and one we will be exploring in the future. It’s partly a generational matter. All those children of assimilated Jews who turned on their parents with cries of indignation at having been denied their heritage, their background, their identity, and turned into bland inoffensive no ones in particular when they could have been real Jews. It’s an understandable reaction, and yet it has some … Read the rest
The Times on Christopher Hill
Feb 27th, 2003 | Filed by Ophelia Benson‘No other historian had equalled Hill’s ability to blend a deeply sympathetic understanding of the poor and unlearned with a seemingly limitless knowledge of intellectual and religious doctrine and strife.’… Read the rest
Christopher Hill Obituary
Feb 27th, 2003 | Filed by Ophelia BensonThe Marxist historian of the world turned upside-down.… Read the rest
Eating Your Cake and Having It
Feb 26th, 2003 11:26 pm | By Ophelia BensonThere are some strange assumptions in this review of Adam Sutcliffe’s Judaism and the Enlightenment. For one thing there’s a confusion throughout between Jews and Judaism. For another and related thing, there is a confusion between Judaism as a religion and Jewishness as nationality or ‘ethnic’ ‘identity’. As a result, there is a confusion between criticising a religion and hating people or a people.
There is also a lot of familiar and none the less annoying sneering at the Enlightenment.
… Read the restThe British-born historian is not the first writer to knock Enlightenment thinkers off their pedestals. The period’s “dark side” has been a recurring theme for more than a century now. Critics (among them Friedrich Nietzsche, the Romantic poets, and
Fabricated Memories Can Be Scary Too
Feb 26th, 2003 | Filed by Ophelia BensonTwo Harvard psychologists test the reactions of people who say they have been abducted by aliens.… Read the rest
The Old ‘Science is Superstition’ Ploy
Feb 26th, 2003 | Filed by Ophelia BensonJonathan 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
Merton Obituary in New York Times
Feb 25th, 2003 | Filed by Ophelia BensonRole 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 BensonObituary of innovative sociologist of science.… Read the rest
News Flash: Enlightenment Hostile to Religion
Feb 25th, 2003 | Filed by Ophelia BensonA 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 BensonParents 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 BensonTeach 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 BensonOh dear, how depressing. We have fewer stars and fewer total failures; we bunch up in the middle.… Read the rest