In An Anatomy of an Addiction: Sigmund Freud, William Halsted and The Miracle Drug Cocaine, Howard Markel writes: At some point in every addict’s life comes the moment when what started as a recreational escape devolves into an endless reserve of negative physical, emotional, and social consequences. Those seeking recovery today call this drug-induced nadir a “bottom.”…TheContinue reading “Learning From Freud: Addiction, Distraction, Schedules”
Category Archives: History of Science
The Philosophical Education Of Scientists
Yesterday, in my Twentieth Century Philosophy class, we worked our way through Bertrand Russell‘s essay on “Appearance and Reality” (excerpted, along with “The Value of Philosophy” and “Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description” from Russell’s ‘popular’ work The Problems of Philosophy.) I introduced the class to Russell’s notion of physical objects being inferences fromContinue reading “The Philosophical Education Of Scientists”
Heisenberg On Minimal Theoretical Change In Scientific Revolutions
In ‘Abstraction in Modern Art and Science’ (from Across the Frontiers, Harper Torchbooks, New York, 1974) Werner Heisenberg wrote: How does a revolution in science come about? The answer: By trying to change as little as possible; by concentrating all efforts on the solution of a special and obviously still unsolved problem, and proceeding as conservativelyContinue reading “Heisenberg On Minimal Theoretical Change In Scientific Revolutions”
CP Snow On ‘The Rich And The Poor’
In 1959, while delivering his soon-to-be-infamous Rede Lectures on ‘The Two Cultures‘ at Cambridge University, C. P. Snow–in the third section, titled ‘The Rich and the Poor’–said, [T]he people in the industrialised countries are getting richer, and those in the non-industrialised countries are at best standing still: so that the gap between the industrialised countriesContinue reading “CP Snow On ‘The Rich And The Poor’”
Snowpiercer: The Train As Capitalist Society And The Universe
Post-apocalyptic art–whether literature or movies–is provided, sometimes all too easily, ample opportunity for flirting with the grand, for making sweeping statements about human nature and the meaning and purpose of life. After all, it’s the (often violent) end of the world. Time to speculate about the new, phoenix-like world that may rise from the ashesContinue reading “Snowpiercer: The Train As Capitalist Society And The Universe”
Noam Chomsky, My Palestinian Student, and a Gift
A few years ago, at Brooklyn College, I taught a class on the formal theory of computation. We covered the usual topics: finite state automata, context-free grammars, Turing machines, computational complexity. As we worked through the theory of context-free grammars, I introduced my students to the concept of their Chomsky normal forms. As a quick preliminary,Continue reading “Noam Chomsky, My Palestinian Student, and a Gift”
Being Reductive About Sport (And How Silly It Is)
Some folks dislike sport. I use the word ‘dislike’ advisedly; the members of this cohort are not offering critical, politically tinged analysis of sport’s entanglement with big business and its value schemas; they are not exposing sport’s use as an ideology promulgating system, it’s supposed facilitation of political disengagement; they are not critiquing sport forContinue reading “Being Reductive About Sport (And How Silly It Is)”
Being ‘Appearance-Challenged’ When Looks Matter
Many years ago, an uncle of mine was talking about one of my distant cousins: about how hard it would be for her to get married, because she was, you know, kind of, how do you say it, “ugly”? He didn’t use the word, of course. He said something like “Her face is a little,Continue reading “Being ‘Appearance-Challenged’ When Looks Matter”
Causation and the Extinction of the Passenger Pigeon
In reviewing Joel Greenberg‘s A Feathered River: The Passenger Pigeon’s Flight to Extinction (Bloomsbury, 2014), and in particular in noting his analysis of the causes of the mass disappearance of the passenger pigeon, Elizabeth Kolbert writes: [G]reenberg isn’t much interested in the mechanics of the bird’s extinction. Even if there was some other contributing factor, he observes,Continue reading “Causation and the Extinction of the Passenger Pigeon”
Constantine Rafinesque’s Anticipation of Evolutionary Theory
The opening paragraph of the Wikipedia entry for Constantine Rafinesque notes that he was: [A] nineteenth-century polymath who made notable contributions to botany, zoology, the study ofprehistoric earthworks in North America and ancient Mesoamerican linguistics. It then continues: Rafinesque was eccentric, and is often portrayed as an “erratic genius”.[1] He was an autodidact who excelled in various fields of knowledge, as a zoologist, botanist, writer and polyglot. HeContinue reading “Constantine Rafinesque’s Anticipation of Evolutionary Theory”
Samir Chopra 