Motivation matters. If the scientific method (which we make into the massive all-encompassing abstraction of SCIENCE to compete with the millennia-eating abstraction GOD)…if the scientific method is a metaphor premising failure (we do not know…
Posts tagged power
The Argument of Arms
Here is the opening of an essay by the Australian poet A.D. Hope called “The Argument of Arms.” It is collected in his 1974 book of essays, The Cave and the Spring. I imagine Melville…
Huck Finn On Interpretation: Jim Answers Coleman
Coleman’s Nihilistic Pedagogy Morse Peckham’s non-final Answer The Instability of “Meaning” GOP Rep. Dr. Paul Broun (GA) offers an example asserting a “Young Earth” Answer Jim’s goodness as answer to all of this (Huckleberry Finn)…
Discipline and Punish
Maybe you’re not 44 and so are not conversant with the movie Reality Bites (its genesis and presentation 20 years past), but I am. The down-and-out 20-something “losers” (heed my punctuation, please) in that film…
Instructed to Ignorance
I started out thinking I could assert that the school curriculum (the “what” of instruction) is irrelevant but that is of course not what I would mean to say. Rather, curriculum is ALL possible responses…
Talking Testing Aggression
My immodest wish is to pass on to my readers the same sense of intellectual contradiction and incoherence I feel in myself, the acceptance of which is, it may be, our only real excuse for…
The Wages of Progress…
People get interested and involved in issues and dilemmas that primarily affect them personally, physically, specifically. I get that. Me too. Yo tambien. However, it seems to me that a particular injustice or unfairness normally…
The Money Virtue As American Rational Religion
The most virtuous and honest character in Dickens’ Hard Times, Stephen Blackpool, often confronts the confusion, ambiguity, paradox, and unfairness of “interests” with an aggrieved and exasperated cry that “it’s all such a muddle.” Even…
Tenure Perches in the Soul
I. “Hope” is the thing with feathers That perches in the soul, And sings the tune–without the words, And never stops at all, And sweetest in the gale is heard; And sore must be the…
Seeking the Safety of Certainty: Totalitarian Minds in Religion and Science
Guiding my thinking is the very clear recognition that I am nearly always a partialist who at times spouts a partialism that upon reflection seems a tad embarrassing. I know some things fairly well in…