Posts published in “Scientific Curmudgeon”

I recently encountered a term for a syndrome that has bugged me since childhood: genealogical anxiety. The phrase was coined by philosopher Amia Srinivasan in her paper “On Genealogy.”

At the beginning of my book Mind-Body Problems, I describe one of my earliest childhood memories. I was walking through weeds on the bank of a river with two friends when suddenly I thought, and then said aloud, “I’m me.”

Climate change is like death. The larger it looms, the less I want to think about it. Recently, however, I’ve made an effort to face global warming squarely.

Does anyone still believe that science can explain, well, everything? This belief was ascendant in the 1980s, when my career began.

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.

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.”