Rorty concluded that there is no position outside historically situated language games from which to distinguish mind from world. … Read the rest
All entries by this author
Students Don’t Know Much, Academic Says 
May 10th, 2008 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
He blames American news networks for creating shows about stupid people yelling at each other.… Read the rest
Robert Irwin on Said’s Shadowy Legacy
May 10th, 2008 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
Tricky with argument, weak in languages, careless of facts, but thirty years on, Said still dominates debate.… Read the rest
Is Schlafly Worthy of an Honorary Doctorate?
May 10th, 2008 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
Lecturing is one thing, an honor is another.… Read the rest
Scott McLemee on Neil Gross on Rorty
May 10th, 2008 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
What tools does a sociologist bring to a book about Rorty that an intellectual historian wouldn’t?… Read the rest
The Cardinal loses the thread
May 9th, 2008 2:09 pm | By Ophelia Benson[I]n Britain today there is considerable spiritual homelessness…Many people have a sense of being in a sort of exile from faith-guided experience…To some extent this is the effect of the privatisation of religion today: religion comes to be treated as a matter of personal need rather than as a truth that makes an unavoidable claim on us.
Yes. That’s because it’s not a truth that makes an unavoidable claim on us. It sounds pretty to say that, but it isn’t true. (The ‘unavoidable claim’ is largely a matter of childhood imprinting. People who aren’t imprinted don’t experience the claim as unavoidable.)
The Cardinal loses the thread quite easily, and quickly.
… Read the rest‘Pope Benedict knows,’ he said, ‘that religion
Katha Pollitt on Dr. Phyllis Schlafly
May 9th, 2008 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
Washington University is giving Phyllis Schlafly an honorary doctorate. Yes really.… Read the rest
Cardinal’s Lecture [click ‘Transcript’]
May 9th, 2008 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
‘Have you ever met anyone who believes what Richard Dawkins doesn’t believe in?’ Yes.… Read the rest
God Mysterious, Cardinal Says
May 9th, 2008 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
‘If Christians really believed in the mystery of God, we would realise that proper talk about God is always tentative.’… Read the rest
Terry Sanderson on Cormac Murphy-O’Connor
May 9th, 2008 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
‘You are a politician as much as a priest, but no one has elected you.’… Read the rest
Resist the Medievalists
May 9th, 2008 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
The pro-choice lobby has no pulpits to marshal its troops.… Read the rest
All the Tom-Toms of the Global Village
May 9th, 2008 | By Andrzej Koraszewski (translated by Malgorzata Koraszewska and Sarah Lawson)“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”
Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Our civilization is a civilization of fear. Walk into any bookshop and look at the titles – horrors assail you from all sides; open a newspaper, check how many headlines try to awake in you a feeling, if not of mortal fear at least of anxiety; take a notebook and a stopwatch to your evening news and write down how many times during one evening you are told about violence, disasters, crimes, and suppositions that aim to trigger your fear, flight impulse, or “righteous” anger.
Newspapers, radio stations, and TV stations are waging a deadly battle over who can frighten you more. Every day specialists check to … Read the rest
Undercover Atheist Joins Hagee’s Church
May 8th, 2008 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
Christian Zionism aims to align America with Israel so as to ‘hurry God up’ with Armageddon… Read the rest
Bush Cites God in Defending War Actions
May 8th, 2008 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
His policies were predicated on the belief that ‘every human being bears the image of our maker.’… Read the rest
MF Husain’s Work Ruled Not Obscene
May 8th, 2008 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
Hindu nationalist groups accused him of ‘hurting their religious sentiments.’… Read the rest
Malaysian Woman Allowed to Leave Islam
May 8th, 2008 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
That’s against the law in Malaysia, but the judge decided she had never actually converted.… Read the rest
Bogus Anti-elitism
May 8th, 2008 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
Pseudo-populist suspicion of them there expurts is not the way to stay in the reality-based community.… Read the rest
God 1 or god 2
May 7th, 2008 12:30 pm | By Ophelia BensonI kept going on arguing in that discussion at CfI yesterday, and in doing that I tried to boil down the point of contention to make it as clear as possible.
There are two possibilities for theists here.
1) There is a god who is transcendent, outside of nature, outside of the universe.
2) There is a god who is descendent, inside nature, inside the universe, and who makes things happen in our world.
There are different things to say about each. About 1, nearly everyone would agree that it’s not possible to offer evidence that such a god does not exist. But theists fail to draw the rest of the obvious conclusion: for the same reason that it’s not … Read the rest
Sleeper on Wieseltier on Amis
May 7th, 2008 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
Wieseltier’s review is preening and melodramatic, an opera bouffe of a literary attack.… Read the rest
The Mystical Fallacies of a Hero of the Right
May 7th, 2008 |
Filed by Ophelia Benson
Hayek is not as rational and irrefutable as the right would have it. He is a romantic, a serious deficit in a social theorist. … Read the rest
