"Socially crippled" — strangely, this phrase appears to be kosher while regular-old-crippled is out ("differently abled, thank you"). Either way, at Slate, William Saletan is raising a ruckus over the notion that "appearance alone can be grounds for a potentially . . . . Continue Reading »
One of our leading experts on the ethics and public policy of scientific innovation, Yuval Levin has written a searching and philosophically deep book on the complicated relationship between science and politics in America. He addresses the divergent ways in which the right and the left typically . . . . Continue Reading »
While performing my bi-weekly survey of what the transhumanists are up to, I happened upon this little gem . From the abstract: Postgenderism is an extrapolation of ways that technology is eroding the biological, psychological and social role of gender, and an argument for why the erosion of binary . . . . Continue Reading »
I make the argument here that an increasing reliance upon Powerpoint among college professors in the humanities reveals much about the state of liberal education and the condition of professional philosophy today. A snippet: The hidden premise beneath the proliferation of PowerPoint in university . . . . Continue Reading »
Some scientists think we should expand the definition of ‘person’ to include chimps: "As a population of West African chimpanzees in the Ivory Coast that just two decades ago numbered 10,000 and accounted for half of the world’s population dwindles to just a few thousand, . . . . Continue Reading »
Jumping up and down eagerly, I’d like to point you to Ivan Kenneally’s article on neuroscience and the soul . Ivan blogged about it previously here . I may be horribly misreading the article, but it seems to me that the problem lies more in reductionist accounts of human experience . . . . Continue Reading »
Matt Crawford ably explains how college campuses have become incubators of schoolmarmish therapeutic supervision. No longer confident in the mission of higher education and therefore too hobbled to resist becoming an adjunct of popular society versus an engine of . . . . Continue Reading »
Time for a moment of self-promotion (not entirely shameless—-I’m mildly embarrassed). For those of you who haven’t yet read my short piece on the marriage of reductionist neuroscience and post-modern poetry here at Culture11 , there is also a much longer piece at The . . . . Continue Reading »
The Economist (August 30) reports on research by a team from the University of Duisburg-Essen on animal magnetism - not animal charisma, but animals responding to the magnetic polarities of the earth. Studying pictures from Google Earth, they “concluded that cattle do generally align . . . . Continue Reading »
Nobel chemist Ilya Prigogine’s work on dissipative structures, complex systems, and irreversibility, Barbara Adam argues, not only challenged particular scientific laws but the classical notion of a scientific law. In classical physics, to arrive at a law was to arrive at a timeless . . . . Continue Reading »
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