There is an interesting convergence on Arts and Letters Daily today: one article about Ibn Warraq and his disavowal of Islam, and one by Christopher Hitchens taking issue with Edward Said, especially his new preface to Orientalism. This pairing interests us at B and W, of course, because we have a fascinating article by Ibn Warraq critiquing Edward Said’s Orientalism, and also because we admire Christopher Hitchens’ writing, particularly the anti-godbothering variety. So there we all are.

I’ve been wondering for some time what Hitchens’ opinion of Orientalism is now. I know they are friends of long standing – the friendship was Htichens’ defense, or at least reply, when Martin Amis shouted at him for insisting on quarreling … Read the rest

I’ve just done a study, one which involved reading one article from the THES and coming to a conclusion about it. My conclusion is that the guy doing the study the article discusses is, well, over-interpreting his evidence just a tiny bit. What did he find in his pioneering research which involved watching a popular quiz show on tv and seeing what kind of people won? He found that non-academics (or ‘housewives’ and workers, as the article oddly called them) did better than academics. Uh…gee…really? Could that be because shows like Wer Wird Millionär? don’t usually ask qestions about quantum mechanics or the Duhem-Quine thesis? On account of how most of the people who watch them aren’t academics themselves? Is … Read the rest

‘On their own terms’ again. Such a handy phrase that is (see ‘Dyslexia in Excelsis’ below). It’s behind so much woolly thinking – the notion that if we’ll all just see all ideas and truth claims ‘on their own terms’ then no one’s self-esteem will be damaged and all will be well. Of course the idea doesn’t apply everywhere – which is indeed the oft-noticed contradiction in relativism, which is the same as the old Cretan liar’s paradox. Relativists want everyone to think that relativism is non-relativistically true. Same thing with ‘on their own terms.’ We’re not supposed to take, say, skepticism about taking things on their own terms on its own terms. But religion, now that’s another story. And … Read the rest

Ah well. Sometimes I worry about the possibility of becoming ever more reactionary and bilious as the days thunder past, but then other times, other times, I just throw up my hands and give in to it. There is just no alternative. For instance when reading the cringe-making ‘Mission Statement’ on the Web site of what sounds like the most cringe-making educational institution one could possibly imagine. The kind of place that makes one want to, I don’t know, dress up as a combination Wall Street shark and Ramboesque thug and roam about kicking small children and grinding the faces of the poor.

We teach of the need to heal from the traumas of living in less than a just,

This article has a lot of food for thought, about how science works and the vexed relationship between theory and experiment.

It was not theory but experiment that plucked the quark idea from near oblivion. Aided and abetted by theory, experiments made quarks real, transforming them from a wayward hypothesis into concrete objects of experience. Experiments are what ultimately discarded the science fashions of the sixties and turned quarks into hard scientific fact.

It’s interesting to think of science and physics as being centers of fashion. Who knew that quarks were a fashion until experiments provided evidence that they were actually there, were not just Platonic physics, as Riordan calls it, but ‘hard scientific fact’? Well of course in a … Read the rest