Outsight Book Reader Diary

Saturday, November 2, 2024

Review: The Cure for Women: Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi and the Challenge to Victorian Medicine That Changed Women's Lives Forever

The Cure for Women: Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi and the Challenge to Victorian Medicine That Changed Women's Lives Forever by Lydia Reeder
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

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Wednesday, October 30, 2024

Review: These Truths: A History of the United States

These Truths: A History of the United States by Jill Lepore
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

POPULISM ENTERED AMERICAN politics at the end of the nineteenth century, and it never left. It pitted “the people,” meaning everyone but the rich, against corporations, which fought back in the courts by defining themselves as “persons”; and it pitted “the people,” meaning white people, against nonwhite people who were fighting for citizenship and whose ability to fight back in the courts was far more limited, since those fights require well-paid lawyers.

Populism also pitted the people against the state. During populism’s first rise, the state as a political entity became an object of formal academic study through political science, one of a new breed of academic fields known as the social sciences. Before the Civil War, most American colleges were evangelical; college presidents were ministers, and every branch of scholarship was guided by religion. After 1859, and the Origin of Species, the rise of Darwinism contributed to the secularization of the university, as did the influence of the German educational model, in which universities were divided into disciplines and departments, each with a claim to secular, and especially scientific, expertise. These social sciences—political science, economics, sociology, and anthropology—used the methods of science, and especially of quantification, to study history, government, the economy, society, and culture.96

Columbia University opened a School of Political Science in 1880, the University of Michigan in 1881, Johns Hopkins in 1882. Woodrow Wilson completed a PhD in political science at Johns Hopkins in 1886. He planned to write a “history of government in all the civilized States in the world,” to be called The Philosophy of Politics. In 1889, he published a preliminary study called, simply, The State.97

For Wilson’s generation of political scientists, the study of the state replaced the study of the people. The erection of the state became, in their view, the greatest achievement of civilization. The state also provided a bulwark against populism.

....

Congress debated Rubinow’s bill, which was also put forward in sixteen states. “Germany showed the way in 1883,” Fisher liked to say, pointing to the policy’s origins. “Her wonderful industrial progress since that time, her comparative freedom from poverty . . . and the physical preparedness of her soldiery, are presumably due, in considerable measure, to health insurance.” But after the United States declared war with Germany in 1917, critics described national health insurance as “made in Germany” and likely to result in the “Prussianization of America.” In California, the legislature passed a constitutional amendment providing for universal health insurance. But when it was put on the ballot for ratification, a federation of insurance companies took out an ad in the San Francisco Chronicle warning that it “would spell social ruin in the United States.” Every voter in the state received in the mail a pamphlet with a picture of the kaiser and the words “Born in Germany. Do you want it in California?” The measure was defeated. Opponents called universal health insurance “UnAmerican, Unsafe, Uneconomic, Unscientific, Unfair and Unscrupulous.”

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Gallup said, remembering his days at the University of Iowa in the 1920s, but “in my day I couldn’t get a degree in journalism, so I got my degree in psychology.” He graduated in 1923, entered a graduate program in a new field, Applied Psychology, where everyone was talking about Walter Lippmann’s 1922 book, Public Opinion, and Gallup got interested in the problem of measuring it. His first idea was to use the sample survey to understand how people read the news. In 1928, in a dissertation called “An Objective Method for Determining Reader Interest in the Content of a Newspaper,” he argued that “at one time the press was depended upon as the chief agency for instructing and informing the mass of people,” but that the growth of public schools meant that newspapers no longer filled that role and instead ought to meet “a greater need for entertainment.” He had therefore devised a method to measure “reader interest,” a way to know what parts of the paper readers found entertaining. He called it the “Iowa method”: “It consists chiefly of going through a newspaper, column by column, with a reader of the paper.” The interviewer would then mark up the newspaper to show what parts the reader had enjoyed. “The Iowa method offers the newspaper editor a scientific means for fitting his paper to his community,” Gallup wrote: he could hire an expert in measurement to conduct a study to find out what features and writers his readers like best, and then stop printing the boring stuff.

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But perhaps the most influential of the new conservative intellectuals was Richard M. Weaver, a southerner who taught at the University of

Chicago and whose complaint about modernity was that “facts” had replaced “truth.” Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences (1948) rejected the idea of machine-driven progress—a point of view he labeled “hysterical optimism”—and argued that Western civilization had been in decline for centuries. Weaver dated the beginning of the decline to the fourteenth century and the denial that there exists a universal truth, a truth higher than man. “The denial of universals carries with it the denial of everything transcending experience,” Weaver wrote. “The denial of everything transcending experience means inevitably—though ways are found to hedge on this—the denial of truth.” The only way to answer the question “Are things getting better or are they getting worse?” is to discover whether modern man knows more or is wiser than his ancestors, Weaver argued. And his answer to this question was no. With the scientific revolution, “facts”—particular explanations for how the world works—had replaced “truth”—a general understanding of the meaning of its existence. More people could read, Weaver stipulated, but “in a society where expression is free and popularity is rewarded they read mostly that which debauches them and they are continuously exposed to manipulation by controllers of the printing machine.” Machines were for Weaver no measure of progress but instead “a splendid efflorescence of decay.” In place of distinction and hierarchy, Americans vaunted equality, a poor substitute.79

If Weaver was conservatism’s most serious thinker, nothing better marked the rising popular tide of the movement than the publication, in 1951, of William F. Buckley Jr.’s God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of “Academic Freedom,” in which Buckley expressed regret over the liberalism of the American university. Faculty, he said, preached anticapitalism, secularism, and collectivism. Buckley, the sixth of ten children, raised in a devout Catholic family, became a national celebrity, not least because of his extraordinary intellectual poise.

Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind appeared in 1953. Kirk, an intellectual historian from Michigan, provided a manifesto for an emerging movement: a story of its origins. The Conservative Mind described itself as “a prolonged essay in definition,” an attempt at explaining the ideas that have “sustained men of conservative impulse in their resistance against radical theories and social transformation ever since the beginning of the

French Revolution.” The liberal, Kirk argued, sees “a world that damns tradition, exalts equality, and welcomes changes”; liberalism produces a “world smudged by industrialism; standardized by the masses; consolidated by government.” Taking his inspiration from Edmund Burke, Kirk urged those who disagreed with liberalism’s fundamental tenets to call themselves “conservatives” (rather than “classical liberals,” in the nineteenth-century laissez-faire sense). The conservative, he argued, knows that “civilized society requires orders and classes, believes that man has an evil nature and therefore must control his will and appetite” and that “tradition provides a check on man’s anarchic impulse.”

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Monday, October 28, 2024

Review: Double Your Brain Power: Increase Your Memory by Using All of Your Brain All the Time

Double Your Brain Power: Increase Your Memory by Using All of Your Brain All the Time by Jean Marie Stine
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

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Review: The Unexpected Universe

The Unexpected Universe by Loren Eiseley
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

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Review: Man and the Universe: The Philosophers of Science

Man and the Universe: The Philosophers of Science by Saxe Commins
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

This is a fascinating anthology of influential writing in the philosophical development of science.

Starting in antiquity, Lucretius moves the conversation away from gulliility by challenging religious fairy tales.

... Centaurs never have existed, and at no time can there exist things of twofold nature and double body formed into one frame out of limbs of alien kinds, such that the faculties and powers of this and that portion cannot be sufficiently like.

This however dull of understanding you may learn from what follows:

To begin, a horse when three years have gone round is in the prime of his vigor, far different the boy: often even at that age he will call in his sleep for the milk of the breast.

Afterwards when in advanced age his lusty strength and limbs now faint with ebbing life fail the horse, then and not till then youth in the flower of age commences for that boy and clothes his cheeks in soft down; that you may not haply believe that out of a man and the burden-carrying seed of horses Centaurs can be formed and have being; or that Scyllas with bodies half those of fishes girdled round with raving dogs can exist, and all other things of the kind, whose limbs we see cannot harmonize together; as they neither come to their flower at the same time nor reach the fulness of their bodily strength nor lose it in advanced old age, nor burn with similar passions nor have compatible manners, nor feel the same things give pleasure throughout their frames....

Copernicus similarly sought to convince based on logic and experience that the earth is a sphere in his heliocentric theory.

The Earth Is Spherical Too

The Earth is globe-shaped too, since on every side it rests upon its centre. But it is not perceived straightway to be a perfect sphere, on account of the great height of its mountains and the lowness of its valleys though they modify its universal roundness to only a very small extent. That is made clear in this way. For when people journey northward from anywhere, the northern vertex of the axis of daily revolution gradually moves, overhead, and the other moves downward to the same extent; and many stars situated to the north are seen not to set, and many to the south are seen not to rise any more. So Italy does not see Canopus, which is visible to Egypt. And Italy sees the last star of Fluvius, which is not visible to this region situated in a more frigid zone. Conversely, for people who travel southward, the second group of stars becomes higher in the sky; while those become lower which for us are high up.

Moreover, the inclinations of the poles have everywhere the same ratio with places at equal distances from the poles of the Earth and that happens in no other figure except the spherical. Whence it is manifest that the Earth itself is contained between the vertices and is therefore a globe. Add to this the fact that the inhabitants of the East do not perceive the evening eclipses of the sun and moon; nor the inhabitants of the West, the morning eclipses; while of those who live in the middle region--some see them earlier and some later.

Furthermore, voyagers perceive that the waters too are fixed within this figure; for example, when land is not visible from the deck of a ship, it may be seen from the top of the mast, and conversely, if something shining is attached to the top of the mast, it appears to those remaining on the shore to come down gradually, as the ship moves from the land, until finally it becomes hidden, as if setting. Moreover, it is admitted that water, which by its nature flows, always seeks lower places--the same way as earth--and does not climb up the shore any farther than the convexity of the shore allows. That is why the land is so much higher where it rises up from the ocean.

A generation later in Novum Organum, Francis Bacon used the metaphor of various "Idols" to explain how false assumptions get picked up, much like modern writers explain logical fallacies and cognitive biases.

But the Idols of the Theater are not innate, nor do they steal into the understanding secretly, but are plainly impressed and received into the mind from the play-books of philosophical systems and the perverted rules of demonstration. To attempt refutations in this case would be merely inconsistent with what I have already said: for since we agree neither upon principles nor upon demonstrations, there is no place for argument. And this is so far well, inasmuch as it leaves the honor of the ancients untouched. For they are no wise disparaged—the question between them and me being only as to the way. For as the saying is, the lame man who keeps the right road outstrips the runner who takes a wrong one. Nay, it is obvious that when a man runs the wrong way, the more active and swift he is the further he will go astray.

29 But the course I propose for the discovery of sciences is such as leaves but little to the acuteness and strength of wits, but places all wits and understandings nearly on a level. For as in the drawing of a straight line or perfect circle, much depends on the steadiness and practice of the hand, if it be done by aim of hand only, but if with the aid of rule or compass, little or nothing; so is it exactly with my plan. But though particular confutations would be of no avail, yet touching the sects and general divisions of such systems I must say something; something also touching the external signs which show that they are unsound; and finally something touching the causes of such great infelicity and of such lasting and general agreement in error; that so the access to truth may be made less difficult, and the human understanding may the more willingly submit to its purgation and dismiss its idols.

30 Idols of the Theater, or of systems, are many, and there can be and perhaps will be yet many more. For were it not that now for many ages men’s minds have been busied with religion and theology; and were it not that civil governments, especially monarchies, have been averse to such novelties, even in matters speculative; so that men labor therein to the peril and harming of their fortunes — not only unrewarded, but exposed also to contempt and envy; doubtless there would have arisen many other philosophical sects like to those which in great variety flourished once among the Greeks. For as on the phenomena of the heavens many hypotheses may be constructed, so likewise (and more also) many various dogmas may be set up and established on the phenomena of philosophy. And in the plays of this philosophical theater you may observe the same thing which is found in the theater of the poets, that stories invented for the stage are more compact and elegant, and more as one would wish them to be, than true stories out of history.

31 In general, however, there is taken for the material of philosophy either a great deal out of a few things, or a very little out of many things; so that on both sides philosophy is based on too narrow a foundation of experiment and natural history, and decides on the authority of too few cases. For the rational school of philosophers snatches from experience a variety of common instances, neither duly ascertained nor diligently examined and weighed, and leaves all the rest to meditation and agitation of wit.

I especially like how he zeroes in on superstitious religious as antithetical to the scientific philosophy even then being born:

LXXXIX

Neither is it to be forgotten that in every age natural philosophy has had a troublesome adversary and hard to deal with; namely, superstition, and the blind and immoderate zeal of religion. For we see among the Greeks that those who first proposed to men's then uninitiated ears the natural causes for thunder and for storms, were thereupon found guilty of impiety. Nor was much more forbearance shown by some of the ancient fathers of the Christian church to those who on most convincing grounds (such as no one in his senses would now think of contradicting) maintained that the earth was round, and of consequence asserted the existence of the antipodes.

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Descartes to comte

Our real business is to analyze accurately the circumstances of phenomena, and to connect them by the natural relations of succession and resemblance.".

Explanation: This passage is from Auguste Comte's "Positive Philosophy," where he argues that the primary focus of scientific inquiry should be on observing and describing observable phenomena, connecting them through patterns of sequence and similarity, rather than speculating about unobservable "causes" or ultimate origins.

Key points:

Rejection of metaphysical speculation:
Comte believes that searching for "first causes" or "final purposes" is futile and unproductive.

Emphasis on empirical observation:
The focus should be on analyzing the observable characteristics of phenomena and identifying consistent patterns between them.

Scientific laws as the goal:
The aim is to discover invariable natural laws that govern all phenomena, reducing them to the smallest possible number.

Yahoo Mail: Search, Organize, Conquer

As we have seen, the first characteristic of the Positive Philosophy is that it regards all phenomena as subjected to invariable natural Laws. Our business is,-seeing how vain is any research into what are called Causes, whether first or final, to pursue an accurate discovery of these Laws, with a view to reducing them to the smallest possible number. By speculating upon causes, we could solve no difficulty about origin and purpose. Our real business is to analyse accurately the circumstances of phenomena, and to connect them by the

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Eddington 1927: The Real and the Concrete The Nature of the Physical World

The modern scientific theories have broken away from the common standpoint which identifies the real with the concrete. I think we might go so far as to say that time is more typical of physical reality than matter...

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