Category: Books

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Brights – nice name for this breed of athiests

A Jungian Notebook

Dolores Brien is one of my favourite bloggers.  This post is typical of why.  In the recent post on various scientists etc I was attracted to science on the one hand and repelled on the other.  Got something clear: I am repelled by the brights.  Good to see Freeman Dyson is not among them, I’d like his blog too – does he have one?  His daugter does – she uses flickr! Some athiests are more spiritual than religious people – dyson is one & maybe Dolores too.

Although Dyson is not a religious believer and as a distinguished scientist is eminently qualified to be a “bright” should he choose to do so, he tells us that he himself sees religion as a “precious and ancient part of our human heritage.” Dennett, on the contrary, “sees it as a load of superfluous mental baggage which we should be glad to discard.” What is missing from Dennett, as Dyson sees it, is the recognition that science is only one way of understanding. “Science,” Dyson writes, “is a particular bunch of tools that have been conspicuously successful for understanding and manipulating the material universe. Religion is another bunch of tools, giving us hints of a mental or spiritual universe that transcends the material universe.” If you use, as Dennett does, only the scientific tools, you will never understand religion. “We can all agree that religion is a natural phenomenon, but nature may include many more things than we can grasp with the methods of science.”

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“Connected Knowing” closer to the source.

Tracking down the source…

Amazon

Women’s Ways of Knowing: The Development of Self, Voice, and Mind
by Mary Belenky, Blythe Clinchy, Nancy Goldberger, Jill Tarule

This 1996 edition is the 10th aniversary edition – originally from 1986

From interviews with 135 women (mostly privileged college students) regarding their search for truth and knowledge, the authors (all female faculty members of colleges or universities) determine five learning “perspectives” that characterize “women’s way of knowing.” The somewhat philosophical text, which skillfully blends narration, documentation, and excerpts from interviews, sees higher education’s teaching methods as more responsive to male “impersonalness” than female “connectedness” and recommends ways to improve the situation. On the whole, a work ironically geared more to the dialectician or feminist scholar than to the “integrated constructivist” or “passionate knower.” For large public and academic libraries. Janice Arenofsky, formerly with Arizona State Lib., Phoenix Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The story interestingly continues, in 1996:

Amazon

Knowledge, Difference and Power: Essays Inspired by Women’s Ways of Knowing
by Nancy Rule Goldberger, Jill Mattuck Tarule, Blythe McVicker Clinchy, Mary Field Belenky

From Publishers Weekly
Ten years ago, the editors, all educators working in the field of psychology, published a theory of epistemology based on interviews with women that caused ripples in academic circles. This anniversary volume contains 15 articles, including one by each editor, that deal with the controversies that arose from the original work, Women’s Ways of Knowing, and the ways in which the writers have since changed their thinking. Several pieces, including one by feminist Sara Ruddick, deal with the concept of “connected knowing,” which, according to the authors, means acquiring knowledge by entering the belief world of another person; it has been criticized by some as contributing to a gender-determined system of learning. An interesting piece by social psychologist Aida Hurtado addresses the issues of race and class in relation to ways of knowing. These scholarly contributions will be of interest primarily to those already familiar with the original work.

This led me to a pdf:

A Feminist Ethical Perspective on Weapons of Mass Destruction
Carol Cohn and Sara Ruddick
to be published in: Ethics and Weapons of Mass Destruction
eds. Steven Lee and Sohail Hashmi, under review at Cambridge University Press.

Which in turn has interesting references:

The phrase “alternative epistemology” comes from Margaret Urban Walker, “Moral
Understandings: Alternative ‘Epistemology’ for a Feminist Ethics,” Hypatia, vol. 4, no. 4
(1989) pp.15-28.

They go on to refer mostly to the two books above… so it seems we are at the source.

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John Brockman interviewed by Kim Hill

Radio New Zealand – Saturday, 15 July:

9.05am Interview: John Brockman Literary agent and founder of online salon The Edge Foundation (www.edge.org) to bring together people working at the edge of a broad range of scientific and technical fields. He is the editor of: ‘What We Believe But Cannot Prove: Today’s Leading Thinkers on Science in the Age of Certainty’ (ISBN 0060841818), ‘Curious Minds: How a Child Becomes a Scientist’ (ISBN 0-375-42291-9), and many other books.

I don’t know how long the podcast will be up there for. Forever I hope, but I listened to it later via mp3 player – which is agreat thing to be able to do! I found it interesting, always one to enjoy the reminiscences of a boomer in the 60’s.  Disturbing too… such interesting people and stories and ideas but with is a strange scientism in the mix, he sides with Dawkins not Gould, there is a glowing link to Denis Dutton at the end, who maligns psychotherapy with his zealous cult like devotion to skepticism.

More on Brockman here by Bruce Stirling (Interesting that I just said he is interesting):

Wired 7.09: Agent Provocateur:

“You’re not interesting?” “Not not-interesting!” he snaps. “Post-interesting! Interesting doesn’t pay. Well, it pays once, but not twice. I used to be interesting. I was, like, the It Boy. Being so interesting – well, it’s not so interesting.”

Then and Now:

    Brockman

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A third wave of Jungian thought?

A Review of “Dialectics and Analytical Psychology: The El Capitan Canyon Seminar” – CG Jung Page:

Miller insists that Giegerich’s thought is not a negation of what Hillman’s archetypal theorizing had accomplished, “but rather a call to continue it radically in an attempt to complete it in its and Jung’s own spirit, an anima-psychology sublated by an animus-psychology.” Giegerich does not deny that the soul is image, Miller writes, but insists that “The soul always thinks.”

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Nice site for quotes

Aristotle Quotes:

Love is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies. Aristotle

This one sums up something wonderful! Moreno has the notion of the co-unconscious and Harville Hendix the “Imago match” but Aristotle already had the idea.

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Freud’s Birthday – he had a really good insight

Psychotherapy still booming 150 years after Freud’s birth:

‘Freud once called psychotherapy a secular kind of pastoral care,’ said the WCP president. In a time when religion doesn’t have the same importance as before, people look to therapists to help them find meaning.

Freud’s fundamental contribution to the development of treatment methods is little disputed today, despite rival schools of thought.

Eric Kandel, American neuroscientist and Nobel Prize winner for his research into memory, calls the ‘father of psychoanalysis’ a ‘giant’ and the greatest research scientist of the 20th century.

This all makes good sense. Somewhere, usually well hidden, inside us, are other autonomous entities & intelligences that influence our lives. That was Freud’s main insight and it is hard to imagine a world where that was not seen as an ordianry fact of life. I’m still reading When Nietzsche Wept and the whole story is set at the time of the birth of that insight. In this WCP (World Council of Psychotherapy) item they call Freud a great researcher.  Right.  To research something so unlike the material world is a daring & tricky thing, but it is research – Freud thought of every analysis as a form of research.  (Where is a reference to that in his writing?) 

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Surfing as I read

Paul Rée – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I am reading When Nietzsche Wept by Irvin Yalom. It is a strange mix of fact & fiction. A sort of "theatre of truth" about the origins of psychotherapy. I wondered if there really was such a photo of Nietzsche and Paul Ree. And indeed there is !

Lou Andreas-Salomé – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Salome features large in the opening of the novel & she seems an interesting & important figure indeed.

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Dust on My Shoes

Peter Pinney

My hero. As a teen I read every book, and he was the inspiration for me to "travel". He was the first hippy. In '66 I quit teaching & with no money followed his example… but I was no traveller. I stayed put once I crossed the Tasman. I was inspired by the utter simplicity of his life. Nothing. His posessions in a string bag.

I have in later years scanned many libraries here in New Zealand and in Australia for his books, to no avail. But he is back on the net:

pp

Amazon

Interview with his wife Estelle | A book by her

Dust on my Shoes A flash telling with music etc – I have seen nothing like it. Some background to the flash thing here

A few years ago I called an album of mine 'Dust On My Shoes', and that title came from a travel book published in ther early 1950s, by a bloke called Peter Pinney. He was an interesting character, writing travel books during the 1940s and 50s… he just had the most interesting, picturesque life," he says.

It was Mick's brother whose film and multimedia company applied for funding to create an online documentary about Pinney, as well as attempting to recreate his journeys.

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More about V & Anarchy.

aforanarchy.com

decare

I don't have an attraction to anarchy but I do like the philosophy of anarchy to be presented accurately. This website is a good resource, and follows on well form the thinking out loud I have been doing here on the book & the movie. The image here contrasts with the end of the movie, where masses of masked people arise to challenge the state, not such a bad shift.

Anyway, an interesting way to do armchair politics.

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