WHO criticizes Bush administration for letting sugar lobby block efforts against obesity.… Read the rest
All entries by this author
Hands Off Lacan!
Jan 17th, 2004 8:46 pm | By Ophelia BensonThis is quite an amusing piece. Albeit irritating. So much rhetoric, so much slippery use of emotowords, so much vagueness where precision is needed – all to protect the heritage of Freud and Lacan. Why, one has to wonder. What is it about Freud that makes people one would think ought to know better, cling so fiercely? I suppose I could postulate some sort of psychoanalytic answer, but would that tell us anything?
… Read the rest“When they speak of ‘professionalising’ people whose business is human misery; when they speak of ‘evaluating’ needs and results; when they try to appoint ‘super-prefects’ of the soul, grand inquisitors of human sadness – it is to hard not to agree that psychoanalysis is in the
The Poetics of History 2
Jan 17th, 2004 5:48 pm | By Ophelia BensonMy first comment on this subject has prompted some comments that suggest a lot of further comments (I’m in a permanent state of Infinite Regress here: everything I write seems to suggest several hundred more things I could write) and subjects to look into further. Empathy; the relationship of research to teaching; other minds and solipsism; the tendency to value emotional stances like empathy over ‘cooler’ more cognitive commitments to justice or equality; and so on.
And there is also this article in the New Yorker about a book of history and a play, Thucydides’ History and Euripides’ Medea.
… Read the restTo describe this war in all its complexity, Thucydides had to invent a new way of writing history. In his
Disgust Quiz
Jan 17th, 2004 | Filed by Ophelia BensonA companion exercise to Taboo. Good clean fun.… Read the rest
‘Middle-Earth is the Kingdom of Kitsch’
Jan 17th, 2004 | Filed by Ophelia BensonPerpetual childhood, emotion on the cheap, sincere sentimentalism.… Read the rest
‘Too Early’ for Women in Afghanistan
Jan 17th, 2004 | Filed by Ophelia Benson‘We are opposed to women singing and dancing,’ Supreme Court says.… Read the rest
Graduate School and its Discontents
Jan 16th, 2004 9:04 pm | By Ophelia BensonInvisible Adjunct has another good comment thread going. Remember that interesting (and often symptomatic) thread about the MLA a few weeks ago? There have been interesting ones since, and now there’s an especially interesting one. Well I say that because of the two last posts (last at the moment, last when I saw the thread), 10 and 11. Number 10:
… Read the restIn the first year of graduate school in archaeology we spent so much time learning about post-modernist theaory and how archaeology could not really tell you about the past (it could only reveal your current political views on power relationships) that by the end of the year my professors convinced me that there was no reason to continue my studies
Framing and ‘Tax Relief’
Jan 16th, 2004 | Filed by Ophelia BensonControl the definition and the game is yours.… Read the rest
Noah’s Flood Made the Grand Canyon
Jan 16th, 2004 | Filed by Ophelia BensonBook offering Biblical version of geology for sale in National Park shop.… Read the rest
The Poetics of History
Jan 15th, 2004 9:14 pm | By Ophelia BensonThere was an interesting subject under discussion at Cliopatria yesterday and this morning – history as defamiliarization, poetics and history, the difference between history and fiction. The whole subject touches on a lot of difficult, knotty questions – other minds; the reliability or otherwise of testimony, autobiography, narrative – of what people recount about their own experiences; empathy; imagination; the general and the particular, the abstract and the concrete – and so on. Meta-questions.
I wondered about the much-discussed idea that fiction can teach empathy in a way that more earth-bound, or factual, or evidence-tethered fields cannot. That novelists have a special imaginative faculty which enables them to show what it’s like to be Someone Else so compellingly that we … Read the rest
Brought to You By
Jan 15th, 2004 7:07 pm | By Ophelia BensonThis is a disgusting item in the Washington Post. It sounds good at first – but then it’s meant to. And at second it doesn’t sound good at all.
The administration proposal, which is open for comment from federal agencies through Friday and could take effect in the next few months, would block the adoption of new federal regulations unless the science being used to justify them passes muster with a centralized peer review process that would be overseen by the White House Office of Management and Budget.
It’s those last seven words that give the game away – along with the word ‘centralized’ perhaps. Peer review is one thing, ‘centralized’ peer review is another, and ‘centralized’ peer review overseen … Read the rest
Regulate Psychoanalysts? Jamais!
Jan 15th, 2004 | Filed by Ophelia BensonLacan said the ‘analyst’s only authority is his own.’ Hmm.… Read the rest
Peer Reviewed – by Which Peers?
Jan 15th, 2004 | Filed by Ophelia BensonBush administration seeks to control who reviews scientific research.… Read the rest
Julian Baggini on Kilroy-Silk
Jan 15th, 2004 | Filed by Ophelia BensonRemember Mill’s distinction between offense and harm.… Read the rest
Certainty No
Jan 14th, 2004 8:10 pm | By Ophelia BensonThe New York Times has an article by Edward Rothstein on the annual Edge question, which John Brockman poses to a large number of writers, scientists and thinkers (many of them all three at once). This year the question is ‘What’s your law?’
… Read the restThere is some bit of wisdom, some rule of nature, some law-like pattern, either grand or small, that you’ve noticed in the universe that might as well be named after you. Gordon Moore has one; Johannes Kepler and Michael Faraday, too. So does Murphy. Since you are so bright, you probably have at least two you can articulate. Send me two laws based on your empirical work and observations you would not mind having tagged with your
Compare Coverage
Jan 14th, 2004 | Filed by Ophelia BensonPhilip Stott looks at reporting on the GM Advisory Committee.… Read the rest
Lingua Franca Writers Sued
Jan 14th, 2004 | Filed by Ophelia BensonBankruptcy trustee demands return of already reduced fees.… Read the rest
NY Times on the 2004 Edge Question
Jan 14th, 2004 | Filed by Ophelia BensonFind the silly comment equating scientific uncertainty with uncertainty about science.… Read the rest
‘Aims To’
Jan 14th, 2004 2:40 am | By Ophelia BensonHere it is again – that endlessly repeated untrue statement about the utility of religion.
People like Dawkins, and the Creationists for that matter, make a mistake about the purposes of science and religion. Science tries to tell us about the physical world and how it works. Religion aims at giving a meaning to the world and to our place in it. Science asks immediate questions. Religion asks ultimate questions. There is no conflict here, except when people mistakenly think that questions from one domain demand answers from the other. Science and religion, evolution and Christianity, need not conflict, but only if each knows its place in human affairs — and stays within these boundaries.
Dawkins does not make a … Read the rest
Good Conversation
Jan 13th, 2004 11:28 pm | By Ophelia BensonStart the Week is always good (well just about always), but I particularly liked last week’s, which I listened to a day or two ago. Richard Dawkins was on, explaining that (contrary to popular opinion) he’s an anti-Darwinian on moral matters. He thinks we should do our best to be different from what our genes would have us be; that, being the only species that’s capable of deciding to over-ride our genetic predispositions, we should damn well do it. Then there was Tim Hitchcock, saying some fascinating things about a change in sexual practices that happened late in the 17th century and caused a sharp rise in population. Dawkins pointed out that what Hitchcock was describing was in fact … Read the rest