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Steven Pinker's Muscular Secularism

Enlightenment Now:  The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress by steven pinker  viking, 576 pages, $35 Steven Pinker, as his blurb reminds us, has been reckoned by Time magazine among the “hundred most influential people in the world today.” In Enlightenment Now he devotes . . . . Continue Reading »

Disenchanted Westworld

Our engagement with the arts is no longer guided by emotion and imagination, but by reason. It’s why we walk away from a show like Westworld concerned with and moved by logos—“theories”—rather than ethos and pathos. Continue Reading »

Newton and Bacon

My rabid pro-Leibniz partisanship notwithstanding, I have to give kudos to Thomas Levenson for his article on the faith of Isaac Newton over at Killing the Buddha. The article closes with a somber reminder: Hence the pathos, the danger that I think Newton himself glimpsed. There is a serious . . . . Continue Reading »

The Pizza Theory

Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historiansby Jeffrey Burton RussellPraeger, 117 pages, $12.95 Revisionist history offers satisfactions of several kinds to a certain type of writer. Not only does the reviser feel a sense of superiority to his predecessors, the benighted drudges who . . . . Continue Reading »

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