Yesterday, in a post on this blog, I wrote about the most familiar kinds of genealogies, the familial, and the quest to uncover their details. Today, I want to make note of another kind of genealogy that sometimes obsesses folks like me: our academic ones. Some thirteen odd years ago, shortly after I had finished myContinue reading “Of Academic Genealogies”
Category Archives: History of Science
Bronowski on the Actively Constructed Good (in the Beautiful)
At the conclusion of The Visionary Eye: Essays in the Arts, Literature and Science, Jacob Bronowski writes: You will have noticed that the aesthetics that I have been developing through these six lectures are in the end rather heavily based on ethics. And you might think that I belong to the school of philosophers whoContinue reading “Bronowski on the Actively Constructed Good (in the Beautiful)”
The Elusive Art of the Book Review
A dozen or so years ago, my first ‘official’ book reviews were published. Both of them had been commissioned–that sounds so grand!–by the APA Newsletter on Teaching Philosophy: Philosophical Naturalism by David Papineau and What Is This Thing Called Science? by Alan Chalmers. (The always-ahead-of-the-curve APA website’s archive is incomplete and I cannot find copies of these reviews any more. PerhapsContinue reading “The Elusive Art of the Book Review”
Diego Marani, Europanto, Blinkenlights, and Hacker Neologisms
In reviewing Diego Marani‘s Las Adventures Des Inspector Cabillot, Matthew Reynolds notes his invention of Europanto, a ‘mock international auxiliary language‘: Marani’s ability to see humour in his longing for a universal language has flowered in his creation of Europanto, a jovial pan-European language which began in his office [presumably, either the the Directorate-General for Interpretation of the European Commission,Continue reading “Diego Marani, Europanto, Blinkenlights, and Hacker Neologisms”
Fish on Eagleton on Religion
Stanley Fish reviews Terry Eagleton‘s Reason, Faith and Revolution in The New York Times and approvingly quotes him contra the excesses of Christopher Hitchens: [T]he fact that religion and theology cannot provide a technology for explaining how the material world works should not be held against them, either, for that is not what they do. When Christopher Hitchens declares thatContinue reading “Fish on Eagleton on Religion”
Bohm and Schrödringer on the World, the Self, and Wholeness
Sans comment, two physicists of yesteryear on matters that might be considered philosophical. First, David Bohm on ‘the world’: [T]he world cannot be analyzed correctly into distinct parts; instead, it must be regarded as an indivisible unit in which separate parts appear as valid approximations only in the classical [i.e., Newtonian] limit….Thus, at the quantumContinue reading “Bohm and Schrödringer on the World, the Self, and Wholeness”
Op-Eds and the Social Context of Science
A few years ago, I taught the third of four special interdisciplinary seminars that students of the CUNY Honors College are required to complete during the course of their degrees. The CHC3 seminar is titled Science and Technology in New York City, a moniker that is open, and subject to, broad interpretation by any facultyContinue reading “Op-Eds and the Social Context of Science”
Adam Gopnik on the Scientist’s Lack of ‘Heroic Morals’
In an essay reviewing some contemporary historical work on Galileo, (‘Moon Man: What Galileo saw‘, The New Yorker, February 11, 2013), Adam Gopnik, noting Galileo’s less-than-heroic quasi-recantation before the Catholic Church, writes: Could he, as Brecht might have wanted, have done otherwise, acted more heroically? Milton’s Galileo was a free man imprisoned by intolerance. What wouldContinue reading “Adam Gopnik on the Scientist’s Lack of ‘Heroic Morals’”
Free Software and ‘Appropriate Technology’
Last week, as part of a panel session organized at Queens College of the City University of New York, I spoke briefly on ‘Free Software and Appropriate Technology.’ I began by introducing the term ‘appropriate technology’ by setting it in the context of India’s attempts to achieve self-reliance in energy production, an effort that inContinue reading “Free Software and ‘Appropriate Technology’”
Karl Steel on the Fallacious Animal-Human Distinction
Who is human? What is distinctively human? Answering this fairly intractable question of demarcation–one that students in philosophy of biology can see peeking around the corner at them when they tackle the subject of whether species exist– can often–if not always–involve defining and articulating the non-human. One particularly well-established tradition of such attempts has beenContinue reading “Karl Steel on the Fallacious Animal-Human Distinction”
Samir Chopra 