May 15, 2013, 1:30 pm
By Tom Bartlett
David Birnbaum believes he has unified the fields of religion and science. He told me so in an e-mail. A book he wrote, Summa Metaphysica, Volumes I and II, “unifies the two fields—elegantly—and seemlessly” (sic).
In April of last year, Bard College devoted a three-day* conference to the role of metaphysics in science and religion, prompted by the “reflections flowing” from Birnbaum’s books, according to a program e-mailed to participants from prestigious institutions including Dartmouth, Grinnell, and Oxford. “We are especially pleased to announce that David Birnbaum will be present during discussion,” the program enthused.
Left unmentioned was that Birnbaum helped finance the conference, that he has no academic affiliation, and that his works are published by an entity that he himself runs, called “Harvard Matrix” or “Harvard Yard Press” or, as sometimes printed on the…
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April 4, 2013, 2:13 pm
By Paul Voosen
Prepare yourselves, dear readers: The United States of North America is coming.
Writing in the newest issue of Dædalus, two historians of science, Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, have taken on a quixotic task: imagining a future historian looking back at our time, in an effort to tease out how we failed to avert a climate-caused collapse. Or, as they put it, how it came to be that “a second Dark Age” fell “on Western civilization, in which denial and self-deception, rooted in an ideological fixation on ‘free’ markets, disabled the world’s powerful nations in the face of tragedy.” (The full version of the article is online here.)
Known for their 2010 book Merchants of Doubt, which examined the role of industry in casting doubts on the findings of scientists on cigarettes, climate change, and other topics, Oreskes, a professor at the University of California at San Diego, and…
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March 27, 2013, 6:44 pm
By Tom Bartlett
When you’re about to have your first child, parents of actual, free-from-the-womb kids will chuckle knowingly and warn that you have no idea what you’re in for. Read all the books, attend every class, but you can’t really anticipate the wonder and the challenge. I found this to be annoying and untrue. Turns out it’s a lot like what the books say, and pretty much what I’d imagined. In a good way. But still.
A forthcoming paper, “What Mary Can’t Expect When She Is Expecting,” by L.A. Paul, a professor of philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is stirring conversation even before it has appeared in the journal Res Philosophica. The paper is a 30-page knowing chuckle with footnotes, and it doesn’t do justice to what we’ve learned from the (admittedly imperfect and sometimes contradictory) social science about parental happiness.
Paul argues that you can’t…
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February 27, 2013, 5:34 pm
By Marc Parry
Scholars are increasingly taking a quantitative approach to history. You see that in the writing of the Stanford archaeologist-historian Ian Morris, whom I profiled in this week’s Chronicle Review, and in the work of even more radical quantifiers like Peter Turchin, a biologist at the University of Connecticut whose burgeoning discipline of “cliodynamics” is featured in a sidebar to the Morris article.
Yet scholars have experienced earlier infatuations with number-heavy history, notably the 70s-era boom-and-bust of “cliometrics.” And now we can quantify it.
In response to the Chronicle Review articles, Mr. Turchin graphed the evolution of quantitative history by tracing how frequently some relevant terms appear in Google’s enormous corpus of digitized books. What he found might be of interest to historians and social scientists, who sometimes tell different stories about what…
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January 4, 2013, 1:14 pm
By Tom Bartlett
In a recent podcast, the hosts of Philosophy Bites called up well-known philosophers—people like Martha Nussbaum, Patricia Churchland, Michael Sandel—and asked them to name their favorite philosopher.
Many laughed at first, perhaps because it’s odd to talk about philosophers as if they were football teams or pizza places. Others complained good-naturedly that they wished the question could have been submitted in advance so they would have had more time to think about it, which is exactly what you would expect from a philosopher.
Several named more than one. Others, like Peter Singer, came up with fairly obscure names (he picked the 19th-century British utilitarian Henry Sidgwick). The most surprising answer came from Catharine MacKinnon, who said her favorite philosopher is “the last woman I talked to, whoever she is.”
I tallied the results, which are below. I didn’t…
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October 24, 2012, 6:33 pm
By Tom Bartlett
October 1, 2012, 3:35 pm
By Tom Bartlett
Karen King
In the past two weeks, thousands of words have been published about these six: “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife …”
That bit of dialogue comes from a papyrus fragment written in Coptic and thought to date from the fourth century. Its existence was revealed by Karen L. King, a professor of divinity at Harvard, at the 10th International Congress of Coptic Studies, in Rome. Even though King cautioned early and repeatedly that the fragment did not prove that Jesus had a wife, that immediately became the focus of popular discussion. BuzzFeed featured a video in which people were asked what they would get Jesus and his wife for a wedding gift (a blender was nixed since everyone already has one).
Among scholars, the discussion has focused on its authenticity. Francis Watson of Durham University, in…
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September 26, 2012, 8:04 pm
By Marc Parry
It was an unsolved mystery of classical music. An “Easter” sonata, sometimes attributed to the 19th-century composer Felix Mendelssohn, had largely disappeared from history. Scholars suspected the work was actually by the celebrated composer’s sister, Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel. But the manuscript seemed lost, so how could they prove it?
Duke University announced this week that a 28-year-old Ph.D. student in musicology, Angela R. Mace, had unraveled the riddle, demonstrating that the 1828 sonata was Hensel’s work. How Ms. Mace did it is a story of archival digging and sheer luck that culminated in a trembling moment of excitement as she held the missing manuscript in the Paris office of its private owner.
The discovery helps shed light on a composer who wrote during an era when a musical career was impossible for such a high-status “lady of leisure.” Hensel lived in “a golden cage”…
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May 2, 2012, 10:55 pm
By Tom Bartlett
In Tennessee a new law took effect last month that allows teachers to discuss creationism as an alternative to evolution. This happened, as nearly everyone has noted, in the same state where John Scopes was tried in 1925 for exposing impressionable high-school students to the evils of evolutionary theory. The Volunteer State has now given us both the Monkey Trial and the Monkey Bill.
But it’s not just one state. Polls show that fewer than half of Americans accept evolution. Most of us still don’t buy it. As the comedian Louis C.K. asked in a bit about people who insist that they can’t possibly be related to monkeys: “Why are you fighting this?”
Dan McAdams offers one possible, rarely discussed reason: Maybe evolution is a lousy story. Actually, McAdams, a professor of psychology at Northwestern University, doesn’t think evolution is a story at all. There is no protagonist, no…
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March 5, 2012, 1:32 pm
By Tom Bartlett
A paper by two bioethicists arguing for “after-birth abortion” has stirred up a debate, to say the least (here’s an earlier post about it). I asked Peter Singer, a professor of bioethics at Princeton University and one of the world’s best-known philosophers, for his take. Here’s what Singer, whose own views on infanticide are controversial, wrote:
In contemporary applied ethics, the issue of the moral status of newborns and the possibility that in some circumstances infanticide can be justifiable, dates back to Michael Tooley’s article “Abortion and Infanticide” published in Philosophy and Public Affairs—perhaps the most respected journal in the field—in 1972. (The authors quite properly note this article, as well as later contributions to the discussion.) Their article doesn’t say anything remarkably new, although it does add some thoughts about the justifiability of infanticide…
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