Author: Huenemann

Julian Baggini reviews it here. Most books on the subject don’t engage the social dimension of science – it looks like this one is an important exception. Excerpt:

While it is central to science that its theories are based on evidence and can be tested, there is a great deal of judgment required when deciding which experiments are critical or what evidence is decisive. There is no method you can simply follow that will determine these issues for you. Breakthroughs often occur because scientists are too bloody-minded to give up on their ideas in the face of unpromising results. As Lewens writes: “Sometimes scientists, like horses, progress best when their blinkers are on.”

… Scott L. Montgomery and Daniel Chirot concur, arguing that ideas “do not merely matter; they matter immensely, as they have been the source for decisions and actions that have structured the modern world.” In “The Shape of the New: Four Big Ideas and How They Made the Modern World,” Montgomery and Chirot make the case for the importance of four ­powerful ideas, rooted in the European Enlightenment, that have created the world as we know it. “Invading armies can be resisted,” they quote Victor Hugo. “Invading ideas cannot be.”

Read the rest of Fareed Zakaria’s review here.

Eugene Thacker at 3AM Magazine:

At issue for Kant is not just the employment of reason over faith or imagination, but the instrumental use of reason – reason mastering itself, including its own limitations. This was as much the case for everyday thought as it was for philosophical thinking: “The opposite of the mind’s self-mastery… is fainthearted brooding about the ills that could befall one, and that one would not be able to withstand if they should come.”

Jacob Rosenberg in McSweeney’s:

Damn. That was a really good point. When I started this discussion, which quickly turned into an argument that I keep demanding be called a “discussion,” I had no idea that you felt so passionately or had such a well-reasoned stance. […] It’s been, maybe, 15 minutes that we’ve been talk-yelling, with you mainly talking and me mainly yelling, and not only do I agree with you, but I’ve come to the conclusion I have sounded like an idiot for years about this subject.

Upon realizing that I am totally wrong and you are totally right, I guess I only have one option: double the fuck down.

Whimsical article here by Jenna Krummings on Nietzsche and dancing, with prose of nearly Tarbettian quality. Excerpt:

He was, in any case, ill-suited to the activity. His health was extremely poor, and his energy often low. Many scholars have thus taken his exhortations to dance as metaphor—no, silly, he doesn’t mean it literally. But c’mon, someone who writes that beautifully about dancing has surely experienced its pleasures first-hand, especially someone so insistent on the flawed philosophical tendency to treat the intellect as separate from the body. This is, after all, the man who explicitly stated, “Every day I count wasted in which there has been no dancing.” Far more likely, in my opinion, is that people simply didn’t see him dance because he did it in private, alone. Several of his letters lend support to this theory.

Take, for example, a 1887 note to his friend Heinrich: “This morning I am enjoying an enormous benefit: for the first time a ‘fire-idol’ stands in my room—a tiny stove—and I confess that I have already performed a few heathenish hops around it.”

This is how I like to imagine him—alone in the mountains, performing heathenish hops like his great hero, Zarathustra.