The appeal court’s decision can be used as a legal precedent for other journalists detained in Iran.… Read the rest
All entries by this author
Roxana Saberi is Out of Evin Prison
May 11th, 2009 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
She is free to leave Iran.… Read the rest
Dial-a-fatwa to Launch in UK
May 11th, 2009 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
Will draw on the ‘expertise’ of scholars from al-Azhar to tell people how to lead an Islamic life.… Read the rest
Measuring the Books: Truth Claims in Islam and its Others
May 11th, 2009 | By R. Joseph HoffmannAll religions make truth claims. These may be specific, as in the form of particular doctrines—heaven, hell, the trinity, the virginity of Mary—or more general: the finality of the Prophet, the exclusive role of the Church as a means of grace and salvation, the belief in the divine election of the Jews.
What is not so widely acknowledged is that these claims of truth are supported by a set of rationales, or to use Van Harvey’s famous term, “warrants” that provide security and confidence to adherents of the religious tradition.
The warrants are seldom available in the sacred writings and doctrines explicitly, but they are often observable in teaching, interpretation and conduct. The three book religions, which often have been … Read the rest
Thinking we know what we don’t know
May 11th, 2009 11:30 am | By Ophelia BensonI read something very interesting in an interview with Timothy Williamson the other day.
… Read the restNot long ago I had a revealing discussion with a professor of ancient Greek literature, who was convinced that, by contrast with the tradition of Sartre, Foucault and Derrida, contemporary analytic philosophy had nothing useful to offer the study of poetry ― a common view in departments of literature. He claimed that it could not handle phenomena such as meaning more than one says. I discovered that he didn’t know of the analytic philosopher Paul Grice’s analysis of just such phenomena, which has had a huge impact on linguistics as well as philosophy. The point is that he had never even looked at Grice’s book (
Papal absence of mind
May 11th, 2009 10:53 am | By Ophelia BensonThe pope’s a funny guy. The right hand knoweth not what the left hand getteth up to. The right hand has an attention deficit.
During his address in Amman, the pontiff called on Jordan’s Muslims and Christians to work together to improve their society. “Some assert that religion is necessarily a cause of division in our world and so they argue that the lesser attention given to religion in the public sphere the better,” he said…”However, is it not also the case that often it is the ideological manipulation of religion, sometimes for political ends, that is the real catalyst for tension and division, and at times even violence in society?”
Yes…but…but Herr Rotweiler, sir, have you not noticed … Read the rest
States of feeling, and of thought coloured by feeling
May 10th, 2009 4:05 pm | By Ophelia BensonYou know how John Stuart Mill had a mental crisis, and became unable to take pleasure in anything. One thing that helped him was reading Wordsworth. Byron was no good to him, Byron was too melancholy himself, but Wordsworth was just the thing – ‘the miscellaneous poems, in the two-volume edition of 1815,’ to be exact.
“In the first place, these poems addressed themselves powerfully to one of the strongest of my pleasurable susceptibilities, the love of rural objects and natural scenery; to which I had been indebted not only for much of the pleasure of my life, but quite recently for relief from one of my longest relapses into depression. In this power of rural beauty over me, there … Read the rest
Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
May 10th, 2009 1:07 pm | By Ophelia BensonGod damn spammers. They keep coming back. I’m having to spend two hours a day cleaning the god damn ads for viagra and xanax and the rest of it out of old comments. Miserable blood-sucking bastards.
[beats head against wall until the blood runs]… Read the rest
The Literature of Putative Blokes
May 10th, 2009 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
Amis, Larkin, Osborne and Tynan had blokish tastes but they remained stubbornly literary.… Read the rest
Quantum Entanglement
May 10th, 2009 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
Quantum theory has been used to investigate everything from free will to consciousness.… Read the rest
Oh Look, God Hasn’t Gone Away Yet
May 10th, 2009 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
It is the domination of the public realm by the private and untestable conviction that is truly repugnant, not the conviction itself. … Read the rest
The Number One Child-Killer Disease
May 10th, 2009 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
Pneumonia – one of the challenges that journalism neglects because they’re not new enough to be ‘news.’… Read the rest
Matt Taibbi on Fish on Eagleton on God
May 10th, 2009 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
Not entirely a fan.… Read the rest
The mirror and the lamp
May 9th, 2009 4:41 pm | By Ophelia BensonI read something interesting in M H Abrams’s The Mirror and the Lamp this morning.
… Read the restEver since Aristotle, it had been common to illuminate the nature of poetry…by opposing it to History…But to Wordsworth, the appropriate business of poetry is ‘to treat of things not as they are…but as they seem to exist to the senses, and to the passions,’ and as worked upon ‘in the spirit of genuine imagination.’ The most characteristic subject matter of poetry no longer consists of actions that never happened, but of things modified by the passions and imagination of the perceiver; and in place of history, the most eligible contrary to poetry, so conceived, is the unemotional and objective description characteristic
Myers on the Templeton Conundrum
May 9th, 2009 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
Money is essential to science, and at the same time it can be a dangerous corrupter.… Read the rest
Lewontin on Browne, Costa, Coyne, Gibson
May 9th, 2009 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
A remarkable amount of the history of science has been written through biographies of ‘great’ scientists.… Read the rest
Parents Refuse Treatment for Son’s Lymphoma
May 9th, 2009 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
Survival rate for Hodgkin’s is 80 percent with chemotherapy; the parents want ‘alternative medicine.’… Read the rest
Pope Warns Against Politicizing Religion
May 9th, 2009 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
‘Often it is the ideological manipulation of religion, sometimes for political ends, that is the real catalyst for tension.’… Read the rest
Michelle Goldberg on Defenders of FGM
May 9th, 2009 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
Ahmadu sees herself as speaking for African women who value female genital ‘cutting.’… Read the rest
Bauerlein on Eagleton
May 8th, 2009 4:27 pm | By Ophelia BensonMark Bauerlein had some thoughts on Terry Eagleton almost a decade ago.
… Read the rest[I]t is a mistake to treat social constructionism as preached in the academy as a philosophy. Though the position sounds like an epistemology, filled with glib denials of objectivity, truth, and facts backed up by in-the-know philosophical citations (“As Nietzsche says. . .”), its proponents hold those beliefs most unphilosophically. When someone holds a belief philosophically, he or she exposes it to arguments and evidence against it, and tries to mount arguments and evidence for it in return. But in academic contexts, constructionist ideas are not open for debate. They stand as community wisdom, articles of faith…Save for a few near-retirement humanists and realist philosopher holdouts, academics