Are analytic philosophers ‘hard-working public relations agents for contemporary institutions and practices’? Or are neo-pragmatists hard-working Artful Dodgers…… Read the rest
All entries by this author
Higher Superstition Revisited: an interview with Norman Levitt
Oct 30th, 2002 | By Ophelia BensonPaul R. Gross and Norman Levitt’s book Higher Superstition appeared
in 1994, rattled a good many cages, and prompted the Sokal Hoax. The book describes
a bizarre situation in American universities in which academics in various (mostly
new-minted) fields such as Cultural Studies, Literary Theory, and Science Studies,
plus a few more familiar ones such as Sociology, Comparative Literature and
the like, make a career of writing about science without taking the trouble
to know anything about it. Gross and Levitt have a good deal of fun exposing
the absurd mistakes perpetrated by people who rhapsodise about quantum mechanics
and chaos theory without having the faintest idea what they’re talking about.
But hilarity aside, there are serious issues involved. The … Read the rest
Oh, rapture
Oct 29th, 2002 3:40 pm | By Ophelia BensonTim LaHaye was on the US public radio show Fresh Air last night. He is a minister, a fundamentalist, a pillar of far-right politics, a former honcho in the Moral Majority, and…a best-selling novelist. To put it mildly. He is the co-author of a series which has sold (I cringe to relate) 50 million copies. The ‘left behind’ series. For those who have the good fortune not to know what on earth that is, the subject matter is ‘the Rapture’. You know. When Jesus shouts in the sky and all the believers are instantly taken up into heaven, to leave the rest of us down here to be tortured for all eternity (after a great deal of to-ing and fro-ing … Read the rest
Scientists were unpopular then too
Oct 29th, 2002 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
Even in that supposed heyday of reason, attacks on freethinkers were a favourite sport.… Read the rest
Shocking news: teenagers are easily bored
Oct 29th, 2002 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
More teenagers report being bored at school in the UK than in other industrialised nations. Let us hope the response is not to replace teachers with videos.… Read the rest
Fiction and consciousness studies
Oct 29th, 2002 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
David Lodge, while evading ‘the false intimacies of celebrity,’ discusses his new book of essays on that intersection.… Read the rest
Anger is energizing
Oct 28th, 2002 5:50 pm | By Ophelia BensonNow that’s what I call good news. A piece in yesterday’s New York Times says that, popular wisdom to the contrary notwithstanding, pessimism and anger are not necessarily always unhealthy and their opposites not necessarily always therapeutic. Just exactly what I’ve always thought! I’m a basically cheerful sort, I think, but it’s an irritated sort of cheerfulness–the two go together. I get a lot of energy and motivation from my generalised anger. It means there are things to do, mistakes that need pointing out, stupidities that need correcting. One likes to feel useful. Julie K. Norem, a psychologist and author of the book The Power of Negative Thinking, says that anger is an energizing emotion. I feel vindicated, and … Read the rest
Sexist or witty?
Oct 28th, 2002 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
Is a poster of a shirtless woman at a Motor Show a stupid throwback to the ’50s or an amusingly knowing and harmless bit of fun? What does it mean that a woman designed the poster? And that a government minister (also a woman) is not amused?… Read the rest
Misanthropes can stay that way
Oct 28th, 2002 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
Good news: people who urge grouches to ‘cheer up, you’ll live longer’ are wrong.… Read the rest
The oracular mode
Oct 27th, 2002 11:22 pm | By Ophelia BensonJudith Shulevitz wrote of Harold Bloom’s new book Genius, in the New York Times Book Review:
“He repeats himself so often that his favorite words acquire the ring of revolutionary slogans (Originality! Vitality!) or ritual denunciations (Resenters! Historicizers!). He makes grandiose and indefensible claims without explaining or arguing for them. He cloaks himself Wizard-of-Oz-like in the polysyllabic hermeticism of cabala and Gnosticism, with little seeming regard for the violence his borrowings may do to those systems or to the comprehensibility of his prose.”
Just so. I had the same problem with The Western Canon; Shakespeare; How to Read and Why. Bloom used to be (and still is when he wants to, it’s just that he mostly seems not … Read the rest
First rule: get the evidence right
Oct 27th, 2002 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
If you want to make an argument, it’s no good saying the flood ate your homework.… Read the rest
Galileo and the gang
Oct 27th, 2002 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
Is the conflict between science and religion inevitable, or a result of tactical decisions?… Read the rest
Trinidadian guppies and Arabian babblers
Oct 26th, 2002 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
Shouting at predators, risk-taking, the Big Mistake Hypothesis, altruism; the questions about cooperation and evolution go on being asked.… Read the rest
The power of facing unpleasant facts
Oct 26th, 2002 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
One independent thinker with an aversion to tribalism and cant pays his respects to another.… Read the rest
Hot and cold running Psychoanalysis
Oct 25th, 2002 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
Is extensive therapy necessary both to survive family life and to raise children who can survive family life?… Read the rest
Report undermines its own message
Oct 25th, 2002 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
Nuffield Council on Bioethics releases report on behavioural genetics, but guides the press to focus on peripheral issue of designer babies.… Read the rest
Tversky and Kahneman on irrationality
Oct 25th, 2002 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
Nobel prize-winner and his late colleague explored the illogical ways humans make decisions.… Read the rest
Not new and not science
Oct 25th, 2002 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
There is a difference between science and computational play; metaphors can illuminate but not predict.… Read the rest
Difference Feminism
Oct 24th, 2002 | By Ophelia BensonSecond wave feminism has always had a radical strand. It has always been about
more than equal pay. It was also, for instance, about exposing and then discarding
banal conventional unreflective ideas that led to banal conventional unreflective
behaviour. Ideas about cooking and cleaning being somehow naturally women’s
work, for example, which led to men cheerfully lounging about while women put
in what Arlie Hochschild calls a second shift. And even more than that, unexamined
ideas about what women are like, what they want, what they should be and do.
David Lodge once remarked that women became much more interesting after feminism,
and his own novels bear this out, as do those of Michael Frayn and other male
novelists who … Read the rest
Guns and probate
Oct 24th, 2002 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
Mistakes in evidence, however small, can undermine a case.… Read the rest