All entries by this author

Christopher Hill Obituary *

Feb 27th, 2003 | Filed by

The Marxist historian of the world turned upside-down.… Read the rest



Eating Your Cake and Having It

Feb 26th, 2003 11:26 pm | By

There are some strange assumptions in this review of Adam Sutcliffe’s Judaism and the Enlightenment. For one thing there’s a confusion throughout between Jews and Judaism. For another and related thing, there is a confusion between Judaism as a religion and Jewishness as nationality or ‘ethnic’ ‘identity’. As a result, there is a confusion between criticising a religion and hating people or a people.

There is also a lot of familiar and none the less annoying sneering at the Enlightenment.

The British-born historian is not the first writer to knock Enlightenment thinkers off their pedestals. The period’s “dark side” has been a recurring theme for more than a century now. Critics (among them Friedrich Nietzsche, the Romantic poets, and

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Fabricated Memories Can Be Scary Too *

Feb 26th, 2003 | Filed by

Two Harvard psychologists test the reactions of people who say they have been abducted by aliens.… Read the rest



The Old ‘Science is Superstition’ Ploy *

Feb 26th, 2003 | Filed by

Jonathan Reé reviews Dawkins’ new book: ‘Dawkins campaigns against superstition with the blind fervour of a religious fanatic.’ Good; too bad there aren’t more like him.… Read the rest



Merton Obituary in New York Times *

Feb 25th, 2003 | Filed by

Role models and self-fulfilling prophecies and ‘an extraordinary range of interests that included the workings of the mass media, the anatomy of racism, the social perspectives of “insiders” vs. “outsiders,” history, literature and etymology.’… Read the rest



Robert Merton *

Feb 25th, 2003 | Filed by

Obituary of innovative sociologist of science.… Read the rest



News Flash: Enlightenment Hostile to Religion *

Feb 25th, 2003 | Filed by

A new book on the Enlightenment’s near-obsession with Judaism is a cautionary tale against ‘the seductions of rationalist absolutism.’ What of the seductions of irrationalism?… Read the rest



Are We Like Sheep

Feb 24th, 2003 11:55 pm | By

By way of addendum to my Note & Comment of yesterday, here is the essay ‘Dolly and the Cloth-heads’ that Richard Dawkins and others discussed on ‘Start the Week’. The subject is one that has interested and annoyed me for a long time. For instance when I read Stephen Jay Gould’s strange little book Rocks of Ages in which he, very oddly it seemed to me, simply took it for granted that the way to carve up the world between science and religion is that science should tell us the facts about the world and religion should tell us about morals. What a very peculiar assumption. Also a very common one, to be sure, but not well-founded; I don’t expect … Read the rest



On Channel 1 Tonight: Junior Threatens Teacher *

Feb 24th, 2003 | Filed by

Parents don’t believe their children behave badly in school, so one plan is to use CCTV and then show them the evidence.… Read the rest



Watered-down Math Books *

Feb 24th, 2003 | Filed by

Teach history by all means, but don’t de-emphasize deductive reasoning and mathematical proofs.… Read the rest



Genes, Yanks, Ethics

Feb 23rd, 2003 5:09 pm | By

When I have an odd moment, or forty five of them, I listen to archived editions of BBC Radio 4’s Start the Week. Yesterday I listened to this one from February 10, with Richard Dawkins and Janet Radcliffe Richards, as well as Robert Harvey and, finally extricated from a traffic jam, Andrew Roberts. This is a highly interesting show which touches on a number of issues we are interested in at B and W. Just for one thing, we get to hear Andrew Marr tell Richard Dawkins ‘You’re not a genetic determinist, are you,’ and Dawkins reply that he’s long been plugging that line: that the way we have evolved does not determine the way we have to be. … Read the rest



Susan Sontag is not a Postmodernist *

Feb 23rd, 2003 | Filed by

‘Even as her early criticism anticipates every academic trend from Cultural Studies to Queer Theory, she has been resolute in her resistance to everything postmodern, insisting on standards, morals and distinctions and the authority of art, experience and truth.’… Read the rest



Women Are Mediocre *

Feb 23rd, 2003 | Filed by

Oh dear, how depressing. We have fewer stars and fewer total failures; we bunch up in the middle.… Read the rest



Richard Dawkins Answers Questions *

Feb 23rd, 2003 | Filed by

On poltergeists, the tooth fairy, God-shaped holes, surprise arrivals at Pearly Gates, and 42.… Read the rest



How Many Kinds of Truth Are There? *

Feb 23rd, 2003 | Filed by

Does the CIA know it when it sees it? Do UN inspectors? Truth commissions? Journalists, spies?… Read the rest



Down With Indifference

Feb 22nd, 2003 9:09 pm | By

There’s been an interesting convergence lately of worry about passion and its absence, detachment and its dangers, or on the other hand about the intrusiveness and intolerance of passion and engagement. The two stances – passion and dispassion – have been exemplified in two thinkers: Richard Dawkins and Louis Menand.

David Bromwich took Louis Menand to task in the New Republic in January for his lack of a ruling passion or driving enthusiasm, excitement or anger, for being too easily unimpressed, too cool, too responsible and distant.

The idea of a radical break in thought is alien to Menand. The leveling of distinctions also serves as an intellectual labor-saving device. Nothing is very new; nothing, maybe, ever was; nothing matters

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What Working Class? *

Feb 22nd, 2003 | Filed by

No fantasy is too extreme when one wants to build some luxury flats.… Read the rest



A Devil’s Chaplain Reviewed *

Feb 21st, 2003 | Filed by

Kenan Malik says ‘an obsessive concern with reason seems to me to be a virtue not a vice.’… Read the rest



Ringing Tone Provokes Suspicion *

Feb 21st, 2003 | Filed by

John Gray reviews Daniel Dennett’s Freedom Evolves, and says the obsession with freedom is a leftover from Christianity.… Read the rest



Passions Rule *

Feb 21st, 2003 | Filed by

Scholars in different fields are looking at emotion. (The list of books at the end of this article inexplicably omits Simon Blackburn’s Ruling Passions.)… Read the rest