Maybe dwelling on one’s problems isn’t all that curative after all?… Read the rest
All entries by this author
Outrage Inflation
Mar 4th, 2003 | Filed by Ophelia BensonNo more of those petty little conspiracy theories, now it’s time for the big stuff.… Read the rest
The Therapy-Science Gap
Mar 4th, 2003 | Filed by Ophelia BensonTherapists and clinical psychologists believe things that evidence has shown to be false, and there is danger in that.… Read the rest
Kinds of Fundamentalism
Mar 3rd, 2003 8:03 pm | By Ophelia BensonThere is more than one kind of fundamentalism, as Terry Eagleton points out in this essay in the Guardian. Fundamentalism is not so much religious as it is textual, which means it covers a lot of ground.
… Read the restFundamentalists are those who believe that our linguistic currency is trustworthy only if it is backed by the gold standard of the Word of Words. They see God as copperfastening human meaning. Fundamentalism means sticking strictly to the script, which in turn means being deeply fearful of the improvised, ambiguous or indeterminate…Since writing is meaning that can be handled by anybody, any time, it is always profane and promiscuous. Meaning that has been written down is bound to be unhygienic…Fundamentalism is the paranoid
Literature Subverts Dogmatism
Mar 3rd, 2003 | Filed by Ophelia BensonIrving Howe’s taste for the complication and open-endedness of literature played hell with his Marxist certainties. … Read the rest
Golden Rice
Mar 3rd, 2003 | Filed by Ophelia BensonCritics of GM are missing the point.… Read the rest
Self-fulfilling Prophecy
Mar 2nd, 2003 9:08 pm | By Ophelia BensonOne of the terms the sociologist Robert Merton, who died last week, was known for was the self-fulfilling prophecy. There’s a lot of the sort of thing about. All the endless assuring each other, for instance, that rationality, secularism, skepticism, atheism are all wrong and mistaken and harmful and stupid because humans have a Deep Need for religion. We have a Longing for ‘spirituality,’ a Hunger for myth, a nostalgia for a Big Daddy to protect us. There is a god-shaped hole at the center of our consciousness and all the silly pointless time-wasting things we do are efforts to fill it. This review of Adam Sutcliffe’s Judaism and Enlightenment, for example, says as much (paraphrasing the argument of … Read the rest
Honderich Reviews Williams
Mar 2nd, 2003 | Filed by Ophelia BensonAnd does not desire to be somplace else.… Read the rest
Midgley Reviews Dennett
Mar 2nd, 2003 | Filed by Ophelia Benson‘He tries much harder than he has before to show that he understands the importance of our inner life.’… Read the rest
Part History Part Polemic
Mar 2nd, 2003 | Filed by Ophelia BensonAnd marred by bad arguments, Simon Wessely says of this book about science and the chemical weapons industry.… Read the rest
Galen Strawson Reviews Daniel Dennett
Mar 2nd, 2003 | Filed by Ophelia BensonDennett on the evolution of freedom.… Read the rest
Postmodernism and truth
Mar 2nd, 2003 | By Daniel DennettHere is a story you probably haven’t heard, about how a team of American researchers
inadvertently introduced a virus into a third world country they were studying.(1)
They were experts in their field, and they had the best intentions; they thought
they were helping the people they were studying, but in fact they had never
really seriously considered whether what they were doing might have ill effects.
It had not occurred to them that a side-effect of their research might be damaging
to the fragile ecology of the country they were studying. The virus they introduced
had some dire effects indeed: it raised infant mortality rates, led to a general
decline in the health and wellbeing of women and … Read the rest
Fear of the Improvised, Ambiguous or Indeterminate
Mar 1st, 2003 | Filed by Ophelia BensonWriting is always profane and promiscuous, Terry Eagleton says. … Read the rest
Warning Signs of Fakery
Mar 1st, 2003 | Filed by Ophelia BensonWe all need to be able to detect bogus claims, Robert Park says.… Read the rest
And University Students Run Amok Too
Feb 28th, 2003 | Filed by Ophelia BensonDebt and the equation marks=money can poison the teacher-student relation.… Read the rest
What Teachers Have to Face
Feb 28th, 2003 | Filed by Ophelia BensonViolent students and low-level bad behavior drive teachers out of teaching.… Read the rest
Teachers Win a Decision
Feb 28th, 2003 | Filed by Ophelia BensonThe law lords in the UK decided teachers may refuse to teach students who have been expelled for violence then reinstated.… Read the rest
What Spinoza Knew
Feb 28th, 2003 | Filed by Ophelia BensonScientific American reviews Antonio Damasio’s Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain.… Read the rest
Made not Born
Feb 27th, 2003 8:03 pm | By Ophelia BensonI’ve been pondering this business of confusing or blurring the boundaries (see this week’s Bad Moves) between a religion and a group of people, between Judaism and Jews, Islam and Muslims, that I touched on in yesterday’s Note and Comment.
It all has to do with Identity Politics, I suppose, which is a large subject, and one we will be exploring in the future. It’s partly a generational matter. All those children of assimilated Jews who turned on their parents with cries of indignation at having been denied their heritage, their background, their identity, and turned into bland inoffensive no ones in particular when they could have been real Jews. It’s an understandable reaction, and yet it has some … Read the rest
The Times on Christopher Hill
Feb 27th, 2003 | Filed by Ophelia Benson‘No other historian had equalled Hill’s ability to blend a deeply sympathetic understanding of the poor and unlearned with a seemingly limitless knowledge of intellectual and religious doctrine and strife.’… Read the rest