Just a few decades ago, psychiatry’s reputation was surging. Biological theories of and treatments for the brain, notably drugs like Thorazine, lithium, Valium, and Prozac, were displacing Freudian psychobabble and transforming psychiatry into a truly scientific discipline.
Posts published by “John Horgan”
Last spring, the Stevens Christian Fellowship hosted what it called “a discussion between two professors (a Christian and non-Christian) in search of truth about what makes us human.”
In 1972, Thomas Kuhn hurled an ashtray at Errol Morris. Kuhn, a historian and philosopher of science, was at the Institute for Advanced Study, and Morris was his graduate student.
My gloomy 23-year-old book The End of Sciencehas been popping up lately, mainly in discussions of physics. Below I respond to recent articles that cite my book:
*David Kordahl, a graduate student in physics, writes in Los Angeles Review of Booksthat it is “hard to imagine today’s popular writing about physics without the existence of two books.”
Last month an avowed white supremacist shot to death 50 people in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. The shooter carried out the slaughter with weapons, including an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle with a high-capacity magazine, that he had purchased legally, according to the BBC.
I’ve been brooding over the pros and cons of facing reality again.
In columns last fall, I described how I stopped drinking coffee after decades of swilling 5 to 7 cups per day.
Can you be too rich? I think so, and so does newly-elected Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “I’m not saying that Bill Gates or Warren Buffet are immoral,” she said recently, “but a system that allows billionaires to exist when there are parts of Alabama where people are still getting ringworm because they don’t have access to public health is wrong.”
In my classes, I like making students ponder the pros and cons of knowledge. We talk about Plato’s parable, in which people imprisoned in a cave mistake shadows projected on a wall for reality.
Science fiction has often warned us about cyborg warriors, mainstream journalism not so much. But several recent articles have focused on this potential peril, including one in The Atlantic titled “The Pentagon Wants to Weaponize the Brain.”