Scull on Foucault

Despite his fitting name, Andrew Scull is not in neuro. He is, however, a professor in the Department of Sociology at UCSD with psychiatry on the brain. Now aside from tickling my allusion fancy, Professor Scull has written several books, of which I can say I’ve at least thumbed through one: Madhouses, Mad Doctors and Madmen: Social History of Psychiatry in the Victorian Era. The thumbing was done for my History of Modern Medicine course which, in and of itself, was as inspiring as it was eye opening. That said, Professor Scull’s book is a favourite work of mine that comes to mind particularly as I near the end of my degree (along with Henri Ellenberger’s The Discovery of the Unconscious).

Needless to say I was happy to see Scull’s review of the newly translated edition of Michel Foucault’s History of Madness. More to the point, I was happy to see it was a scathing review. A quote:

Narrowness of this kind is not confined to footnotes. Foucault’s isolation from the world of facts and scholarship is evident throughout History of Madness. It is as though nearly a century of scholarly work had produced nothing of interest or value for Foucault’s project. What interested him, or shielded him, was selectively mined nineteenth-century sources of dubious provenance. Inevitably, this means that elaborate intellectual constructions are built on the shakiest of empirical foundations, and, not surprisingly, many turn out to be wrong.

Scull concludes his article, stating that

The back cover of History of Madness contains a series of hyperbolic hymns of praise to its virtues. Paul Rabinow calls the book “one of the major works of the twentieth century”; Ronnie Laing hails it as “intellectually rigorous”; and Nikolas Rose rejoices that “Now, at last, English-speaking readers can have access to the depth of scholarship that underpins Foucault’s analysis”. Indeed they can, and one hopes that they will read the text attentively and intelligently, and will learn some salutary lessons. One of those lessons might be amusing, if it had no effect on people’s lives: the ease with which history can be distorted, facts ignored, the claims of human reason disparaged and dismissed, by someone sufficiently cynical and shameless, and willing to trust in the ignorance and the credulity of his customers.

Oh yes, Foucault is finally fully translated into English. Me thinks it’s about time.

the emovisible man

law and the brain

Much blogable ado has been made about the New York Times article ‘The Brain on the Stand‘ by Jeffrey Rosen (and I would say quite rightly so). While the article shows nuance in the opinions of brain imagers, and as much as I would fully recommend you read the entire article, Rosen really does sum things up quite nicely:

As the new technologies proliferate, even the neurolaw experts themselves have only begun to think about the questions that lie ahead. Can the police get a search warrant for someone’s brain? Should the Fourth Amendment protect our minds in the same way that it protects our houses? Can courts order tests of suspects’ memories to determine whether they are gang members or police informers, or would this violate the Fifth Amendment’s ban on compulsory self-incrimination? Would punishing people for their thoughts rather than for their actions violate the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment? However astonishing our machines may become, they cannot tell us how to answer these perplexing questions. We must instead look to our own powers of reasoning and intuition, relatively primitive as they may be.

As Stephen Morse puts it, neuroscience itself can never identify the mysterious point at which people should be excused from responsibility for their actions because they are not able, in some sense, to control themselves. That question, he suggests, is “moral and ultimately legal,” and it must be answered not in laboratories but in courtrooms and legislatures. In other words, we must answer it ourselves.

Another interesting thing: the article mentions the Center for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics. It’s worth a gander for some interesting reports and outlines some spooky issues ranging from brain ‘fingerprinting’ to psychotropic weapons.

infidel

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is Somali, a former member of the Muslim Brotherhood, and now a scholar with the American Enterprise Institute. Controversy for Ali came to a head as Theo van Gogh was assassinated for directing a film she wrote on the treatment of women in conservative Islam.

Submission Pt 1

It doesn’t look like she’s pulling any punches in her new book ‘Infidel’.

From Guernica:

So the only way to preserve Islam on the one hand and counter them as moderate Muslims is to say “Well you guys are right. All this stuff is in the Qu’ran. The Qu’ran is written by human beings. And as human beings, endowed with reason, we can change this because we don’t think that it’s beneficial. Or even if we are not going to change it, we are going to believe that in its context, because the Qu’ran was written in a different time, in a different context, in a different age. We’re going to move on; we’re going to take from the Qu’ran those things that we think are compatible with human hearts.” But the minute you start doing that, that’s when hell comes in, and the radicals will say “Oh, but then you are not a believer because you are refuting what God says.”

So that’s why I say in the book, Ok, in that case, let’s review the individual relationship between God or the concept of God and the individual… If we only see God as an entity that we submit to, but like other religions—and I think Jews have done this, Christians have done this; certainly Protestants have done this—instead see God as an entity that you can argue with, and that means propagating the idea that if you argue with God he won’t send you to hell—[laughs]—

Guernica: Otherwise it’s hard to win that argument.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Yes, of course—because he tells you “shut up.” So we have to get rid of this idea that God is an entity that only says “I say so” (because in that case God is a dictator) and then you have an argument. And then you can probably win the hearts and minds of young people who just want to live. Not only young people; also older ordinary people who just want to lead a normal life, and for whom life is difficult enough as it is. Without coming with all this jihadi bullshit.

I’m looking forward to her newer new book though…

I’m working on another book, called Shortcut to Enlightenment, Part 1. I’m waking the prophet Muhammed up in the New York Public Library. When he got his revelation, he got it in a cave, and he was illiterate. In my story, he’s literate and he wakes up in a library. And he gets to see New York and he gets to think that this empire was built by his people, his followers; and he discovers a few inconsistencies, such as what he sees as uninhibited capitalism … So then he thinks, “No, this is not my philosophy, the people who built this are not my followers.”
So he goes and finds out what his followers have been up to since his death—and he’s very, very surprised. Because they’re killing each other, they’re targeting everyone else, they’re weak. And so then he’s very, very sad; and in that saddened state he encounters John Stuart Mill. And so they have a dialogue on the position of women in society and the relationship between men and women.

And in another chapter he has a conversation on the relationship of the individual and the community. And in another chapter he has a dialogue with Karl Popper on the open society and its enemies. And Karl Popper asserts that Islam is an enemy of the open society. And the last chapter is about what happens to the prophet after these dialogues. Does he convert to the ideas of these liberals or does he stick to his own?

groks

I came across the website for Berkeley Groks, a great little science radio show on KALX 90.7 FM.  Check it out.

P.S.  There’s a great interview on art and the brain with Professor Semir Zeki from University College London right here.

let’s get ready to rumble!

christopher hitchens on freedom of expression at u of t

more video madness!

Part I

Part II

Part III

Part IV

want to see a magic trick?

john stuart mill

As often as a study is cultivated by narrow minds, they will draw from it narrow conclusions.

jesus grapevine

this sounds like a bad soap opera:

jesus has returned as Dr. Jose Luis De Jesus Miranda to collect rolex watches and random companies from his followers whilst a bikini girl, one of His exclusive singers, sings about how she loves how her lover knows what she likes in her coffee.

but just when you thought it was safe, it turns out he’s the antichrist. the end is nigh! save yourself latina lovegirl!

maybe latina lovegirl can give us some solace, after all ‘Latina lovergirl is in love with love and loving it–whether she’s splashing poolside in a bikini or shimmying bare-midriff style on a soundstage she’s selling it big time in this infectious, horn-peppered pop.’ Watch it! The apocalypse was never sexier.

via pharyngula