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I was going to write something about how F. Gülen made it to the top of the list of public intellectuals, but National Public Radio beat me to it for U.S. readers and British readers already knew about it. However, the fact segues prettily into my main point of the day, which is that a sophisticated print and online campaign was organized by members of the organization that shares Mr. G's beliefs regarding the necessity of taking science seriously while practicing what he practices and expecting the outcome that he expects. All of which feeds into international politics in ways I do not wish to pursue further.
Rather, I was struck this morning by David Brooks' philosophically inclined column on the new conditions of scientific discovery and how things like the genome project have not yet led to the kind of excessively optimistic social engineering that the twentieth century saw so much of.
Brooks is pursuing his own right-wing agenda with all of this, but the relative lack of hubris on the part of researchers is indeed striking when one considers how much political and social theory was built on such slender empirical evidence in the era when the ruling models of reality were first toppled by what Freud termed humanity's narcissistic hurts in terms of cosmology and biology and psychology.
Alan Wolfe's review of the new behavioral models of economics, in The New Republic online [ http://www.tnr.com/story_print.html?id=3bc0e959-3b4e-440d-9b99-69078429b82c ], confirms the need for modesty, as he celebrates the demise of free-market-oriented rational choice theory of models of homo economicus without buying into the methodology of Predictably Irrational, which he finds erroneous in its extrapolations and deficient in the structure of its experiments.
Given the flood of alternative explanations currently appearing (and some of them are singularly absurd) it's good to know that people aren't planning whole political campaigns on this sort of finding, much less political parties.
But to get back to Brooks, his reference to the dominant social engineering models of the twentieth century reminded me of how much the intellectuals of so much of that century were forced to choose among two or three equally unsatisfactory options. And while Karl Kraus (or was it Kurt Tucholsky?) could coin an elegant epigram with "When forced to choose between two evils, I shall choose neither," most people had to choose even if they knew they were, to quote a much later rock song, choosing to lose.
How much happier a fate to be able to adapt one's chosen movement or beliefs to the conditions of the day without surrendering intellectual autonomy altogether. Even better if one can be as comprehending of the day's scientific discoveries and available technologies as one's mental capacities will allow.
And best of all if one can follow up on past trains of thought that got derailed and never put back on track because, to follow that metaphor to absurdity, the trains simply stopped running.
I have referred before to Stephen Braude's philosophical investigations of the paranormal and his insistence that professional skeptics operate by refuting the existence of phenomena other than those under investigation, or the error of beliefs that do not logically follow from the available evidence.
This is not the only train of thought that got off track about a century ago and has been a veritable train wreck ever since. (I am determined to kill off this metaphor once and for all, or else make people self-conscious when they use it.)
I have frequently referred to Wittgenstein and his habits that baffled his philosophical colleagues because so much of twentieth century philosophy went off in wrong directions that today are not taken very seriously...so that one assumes that had he been born a half century later, Wittgenstein would have had quite other sets of interests and ways of following up on the problems that he saw as genuine problems (even if he at first assumed they lay outside the limits of language and therefore had to be shown rather than talked about).
There have still been precious few thinkers who have been willing to consider all the variables of human existence without denigrating one or the other of them or worse, misunderstanding them. Even my hero Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project, which he apparently had cross-referenced for his own use in a manner suggestive of what would eventually become hypertext documents, leaves out great chunks of Paris, capital of the nineteenth century.
And I certainly don't do an adequate job of keeping all the balls in the air at once (please note that I have switched metaphors, this being a hell of a way to run a railroad).
Which reminds me, because I am a free-associating old fart, of the parody cartoon from Grump that I had on my wall in college, the only episode ever of "The NEW Adventures of Martin Heidegger." In it, Aristotle bursts into Heidegger's cottage in the mountains and "[tears] Heidgger's ontology limb from limb." "But I'm washed up as a philosopher, then," Heidegger wails, and Aristotle replies, "Well, what did you do before you started philosophizing?" The final panel shows Heidegger saying, "You know, I liked juggling a whole hell of a lot better, anyway."
Rather, I was struck this morning by David Brooks' philosophically inclined column on the new conditions of scientific discovery and how things like the genome project have not yet led to the kind of excessively optimistic social engineering that the twentieth century saw so much of.
Brooks is pursuing his own right-wing agenda with all of this, but the relative lack of hubris on the part of researchers is indeed striking when one considers how much political and social theory was built on such slender empirical evidence in the era when the ruling models of reality were first toppled by what Freud termed humanity's narcissistic hurts in terms of cosmology and biology and psychology.
Alan Wolfe's review of the new behavioral models of economics, in The New Republic online [ http://www.tnr.com/story_print.html?id=3bc0e959-3b4e-440d-9b99-69078429b82c ], confirms the need for modesty, as he celebrates the demise of free-market-oriented rational choice theory of models of homo economicus without buying into the methodology of Predictably Irrational, which he finds erroneous in its extrapolations and deficient in the structure of its experiments.
Given the flood of alternative explanations currently appearing (and some of them are singularly absurd) it's good to know that people aren't planning whole political campaigns on this sort of finding, much less political parties.
But to get back to Brooks, his reference to the dominant social engineering models of the twentieth century reminded me of how much the intellectuals of so much of that century were forced to choose among two or three equally unsatisfactory options. And while Karl Kraus (or was it Kurt Tucholsky?) could coin an elegant epigram with "When forced to choose between two evils, I shall choose neither," most people had to choose even if they knew they were, to quote a much later rock song, choosing to lose.
How much happier a fate to be able to adapt one's chosen movement or beliefs to the conditions of the day without surrendering intellectual autonomy altogether. Even better if one can be as comprehending of the day's scientific discoveries and available technologies as one's mental capacities will allow.
And best of all if one can follow up on past trains of thought that got derailed and never put back on track because, to follow that metaphor to absurdity, the trains simply stopped running.
I have referred before to Stephen Braude's philosophical investigations of the paranormal and his insistence that professional skeptics operate by refuting the existence of phenomena other than those under investigation, or the error of beliefs that do not logically follow from the available evidence.
This is not the only train of thought that got off track about a century ago and has been a veritable train wreck ever since. (I am determined to kill off this metaphor once and for all, or else make people self-conscious when they use it.)
I have frequently referred to Wittgenstein and his habits that baffled his philosophical colleagues because so much of twentieth century philosophy went off in wrong directions that today are not taken very seriously...so that one assumes that had he been born a half century later, Wittgenstein would have had quite other sets of interests and ways of following up on the problems that he saw as genuine problems (even if he at first assumed they lay outside the limits of language and therefore had to be shown rather than talked about).
There have still been precious few thinkers who have been willing to consider all the variables of human existence without denigrating one or the other of them or worse, misunderstanding them. Even my hero Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project, which he apparently had cross-referenced for his own use in a manner suggestive of what would eventually become hypertext documents, leaves out great chunks of Paris, capital of the nineteenth century.
And I certainly don't do an adequate job of keeping all the balls in the air at once (please note that I have switched metaphors, this being a hell of a way to run a railroad).
Which reminds me, because I am a free-associating old fart, of the parody cartoon from Grump that I had on my wall in college, the only episode ever of "The NEW Adventures of Martin Heidegger." In it, Aristotle bursts into Heidegger's cottage in the mountains and "[tears] Heidgger's ontology limb from limb." "But I'm washed up as a philosopher, then," Heidegger wails, and Aristotle replies, "Well, what did you do before you started philosophizing?" The final panel shows Heidegger saying, "You know, I liked juggling a whole hell of a lot better, anyway."
