And there arose a great noise in the land, and a whirling on the waters, and the people were sore afraid, or upset, or worried, or puzzled, or something. Why? Because of a movie, of course. What movie? you ask, all athirst to know. Well what movie do you think? The Rembrandt code, of course. No no, I know; the Renoir code. No no, I’m just playing silly buggers; the Kandinsky code. Oh all right, the Da Vinci Code. (A title which causes a faint electrical hum of irritation every time I hear or see it, because as any fule kno, Da Vinci is not Leonardo’s surname. It’s like titling a book and movie The Of Devonshire Code after the … Read the rest

Thought for the day. From Dave Hill at ‘Comment is Free’.

Why are some progressives turning against identity politics? After all, aren’t they the means for liberating the oppressed? In fact, they have always had their critics from the left. But Islamic terrorism has, I guess, provided a new and more public momentum. Awkward questions are being asked, not least on this site: how can liberals support assertions of Muslim identity when these include the subordination of women and hatred of gays? How can the anti-war left march hand-in-hand with hardline Islamists? Tricky issues. And I’m a bit conflicted about them. I’m wary of accidentally joining in with the dreary right-wing drone about “victim culture”, “multiculturalism” (whatever they think

This little aside in Scott McLemee’s column made me laugh.

For better and for worse, the American reception of contemporary French thought has often followed a script that frames everything in terms of generational shifts. Lately, that has usually meant baby-boomer narcissism – as if the youngsters of ‘68 don’t have enough cultural mirrors already. Someone like Bernard-Henri Lévy, the roving playboy philosopher, lends himself to such branding without reserve. Most of his thinking is adequately summed up by a thumbnail biography – something like, “BHL was a young Maoist radical in 1968, but then he denounced totalitarianism, and started wearing his shirts unbuttoned, and the French left has never recovered.” Nor are American academics altogether immune to such prepackaged

Funnily enough, reviewers aren’t thronging and jostling to review Why Truth Matters. Maybe they figured out that it was actually an extended exercise in irony, or something, and didn’t want to be made to look foolish by taking it seriously. Anyway there is one review from Library Journal, posted at Barnes & Noble.

Benson and Stangroom (coeditors, www. butterfliesandwheels.com) set out to prove why truth matters. Their argument isn’t so much one for truth as one against ideologies and philosophies that minimize truth’s importance. These counterarguments include discourses on basic human thought, cultural relativism, political reasoning, feminism, and other current and historical thought movements. The writing is superbly engaging, and each chapter is well argued. But the … Read the rest

Let’s talk about sin. We don’t talk about sin enough, I’ve noticed. We’re very slack that way. Very lax. Very slothy and loose and – well – sinful. So let’s give it a look-see.

First let’s see what a godless philosophy type has to say about it.

…ideas of right and wrong can be entirely separated from ideas of what is sinful. Aristotle, for example, thought of good and bad in terms of what allowed human beings to flourish as rational animals, with no reference to God’s will. Whereas sin separates us from the divine, doing wrong separates us from our true natures or our fellow humans.

Got it. Okay. Sin separates us from the divine, so for those of … Read the rest

A commenter raised an interesting point on the pontifical post, a point that I’ve been pondering on and off (mostly off) ever since JS cc’d me his replies to the HERO interview.

The point the commenter raises is the same one JS raises: the idea that it’s good to teach pseudoscience in universities because otherwise people get smug and lazy. Bridget in comments:

Students who are not exposed to a range of theories with stronger or weaker truth claims, do not develop the ability to critically judge the validity of what they are taught – they become lazy thinkers.

JS in the interview:

I’m not comfortable with consensus, so I think if it turned out that the kinds