All entries by this author

Scholars Fret: How Much to Hide Female Bodies? *

Mar 4th, 2005 | Filed by

How covered is covered enough? Agreement remains elusive.… Read the rest



Women Worse Off Now Than Decade Ago *

Mar 4th, 2005 | Filed by

Piecemeal approach to women’s rights cannot achieve goals of Beijing conference.… Read the rest



US Drops Effort to Limit Women’s Rights via UN *

Mar 4th, 2005 | Filed by

Amnesty International hails end of anti-abortion amendment.… Read the rest



Mysterious Ways

Mar 4th, 2005 1:44 am | By

And since you mentioned skepticism – explain something to me. This Intelligent Designer we hear so much about. It’s supposed to answer those questions that atheists and biologists and similar tiresome people can’t answer. But the thing about this Intelligent Designer character is that it raises a hell of a lot of questions that don’t arise if there’s no need to explain the Intelligent Designer. Surely finding the Intelligent Designer a satisfactory answer to questions while finding Designer-free answers unsatisfactory, relies on ignoring a great barnlike stack of questions that trail in the wake of the Intelligent Designer. The most obvious one of course is Okay smartyboots then who designed the Designer? But there are others.

The one that I’ve … Read the rest



More Skeptical Sceptics

Mar 4th, 2005 12:52 am | By

The Third Skeptics’ Circle is posted. Read, doubt, enjoy.… Read the rest



Rawls, Habermas and Bobbio in an Age of War *

Mar 3rd, 2005 | Filed by

In era of serial war, three theorists of a perpetual peace. … Read the rest



MBA Maybe Necessary but not Sufficient *

Mar 3rd, 2005 | Filed by

Business students learn economics but they need more than that.… Read the rest



Victory for Muffled Women *

Mar 2nd, 2005 | Filed by

Shabina Begum wins right to wear concealing clothes.… Read the rest



Johnson and the Women *

Mar 2nd, 2005 | Filed by

Despite dog on hind legs remark, Johnson had clever women for friends.… Read the rest



Supreme Court Rules Against Execution of Juveniles *

Mar 2nd, 2005 | Filed by

Supreme Court ruled against capital punishment for crimes committed before age 18.… Read the rest



Yet More on WomenandMathandNatureandCulture *

Mar 2nd, 2005 | Filed by

Useful look at several studies.… Read the rest



Old News You Can Use: the denaturing of history

Mar 2nd, 2005 | By Barney F. McClelland

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.

George Orwell, 1984

If there were a poll assessing the least favorite subject taught in high school, I would have to put my money on history or its more au courant euphemistic title, “social studies”. If history is not the clear cut winner, it would certainly be among the top three – my choice, mathematics, I suppose, would also be a strong contender.

The chronic complaint against history as a subject, you will hear from most Americans, is that it is “old news”. In our up-to-the-minute media saturated culture this is an undeniable fact. “That was soooo last year,” is perhaps a bit exaggerated, … Read the rest



Duty Duty Duty

Mar 1st, 2005 10:38 pm | By

Last month Richard Posner said something similar to what Stanley Fish said, but Posner said it much more clearly.

For as a practical matter, chief executive officers do not enjoy freedom of speech. A CEO is the fiduciary of his organization, and his duty is to speak publicly only in ways that are helpful to the organization. Not that he should lie; but he must avoid discussing matters as to which his honestly stated views would harm the organization. (Judges also lack complete freedom of speech; as I mentioned in our introductory blog posting, I am not permitted to comment publicly on any pending or impending court case.) Summers must think that his remarks did harm the university, as

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Joseph Carroll’s Literary Darwinism *

Mar 1st, 2005 | Filed by

Debunking puffery of postmodernists and sly misrepresentations of Stephen Jay Gould.… Read the rest



Paley’s New Clothes *

Mar 1st, 2005 | Filed by

Niall Shanks looks at both biological and cosmological arguments for Intelligent Design.… Read the rest



On Stephen Greenblatt *

Mar 1st, 2005 | Filed by

Is he an apostate of Theory?… Read the rest



Voltaire Feared Boredom, not Inconsistency *

Mar 1st, 2005 | Filed by

He was like Nancy Mitford, Michael Moore, Susan Sontag, Toad of Toad Hall.… Read the rest



Hume and the Deep-fried Mars Bar *

Mar 1st, 2005 | Filed by

Slightly parochial review of new biography.… Read the rest



Doing What Job?

Mar 1st, 2005 4:25 am | By

Stanley Fish has an interesting take on the Larry Summers matter. (You don’t mind if I call him Larry do you? Everyone else does. I’m not pretending I know him, it’s just that it’s easier than trying to remember whether he spells it Laurence or Lawrence. Plus it sounds so much more friendly, and knowing, and American, and as if I might be important enough to know him, which I’m not.)

It is only if Summers’ performance at the January 14th conference (where he wondered if the underrepresentation of women in the sciences and math might have a genetic basis) was intentional — it is only if he knew what he was doing — that he can be absolved of

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I Believe Because They Believe and Vice Versa

Mar 1st, 2005 12:02 am | By

The Fifth Carnival of the Godless is posted. And I’ve been meaning to point out this post at Normblog for days. He points out what seem (from the available evidence, e.g. what the article reports) like rather dubious bits of reasoning in an article about the possible evolutionary basis for religion.

There is one quite convincing comment in the article though. It gestures at something I often think.

Childish belief is one thing, but religious belief is embraced by people of all ages and is by no means the preserve of the uneducated. According to Boyer, the persistence of belief into adulthood is at least in part down to a presumption. “When you’re in a belief system, it’s not that

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