Chris, you’re a bright bloke, well-read, great company and all that, but this is plain daft.
The Silly Bunt’s article was a steaming pile of cack and responding to her adolescent nonsense about “the Enlightenment” (and her many justified critics in blogland) by wibbling on about “Paolo Mattia Doria’s contemporary five-fold distinction” is a bit like me responding to “Dr” Gillian McKeith‘s pronouncements about human turds and their owners’ nutritional shortcomings on You Are What You Eat by inviting an in-depth discussion of models of digestive enzyme kinetics.
I mean, what the fuck is this about?
The bit which most intrigues me is whether a new understanding about rationality emerged in the eighteenth century and if so, how was it then positioned vis a vis religious belief? Since then, we’ve had Freud, Foucault and Nietzsche – all of whom have contributed to the understanding that we are profoundly irrational and that rationality is a social construction – a way of reasoning which we believe to be objective, but never can be.
“Thank you for your application to St Swithin’s College, Oxbridge, Madeleine, but I’m afraid we felt that there were some weaknesses in one of the answers you submitted in your General Paper. We do wish you the very best of luck in your future endeavours.”
No, Chris, it’s not “terribly exciting”. Well, only in the same way it would be “terribly exciting” if a student put his hand up in a lecture and asked “Isn’t it possible that the Starship Enterprise’s dilithium crystals hold the answer to protein folding problem?” and everyone else in the room looked at him like he was a wassock—which, funnily enough, is exactly what he would be.
The woman’s a clown and her drivellings undeserving of even a moment’s serious consideration by someone in your position. If I weren’t completely bald (and, er, no longer employed as a scientist) I’d have you up before this lot for bringing the academy into disrepute.
Has this post got no comments because it’s about politics and that?
Dear me. Your readership must be thick.
Not like mine. They’re all clever and that.
How did Villa do today by the way.
Mind you I hate that knackerdan Henry (ok he is a bit good but he’s such an arrogant twat it makes me want to puke on his little French car) fuck his Va Va Voom.
Nice civilian shirts mind you.
Ha! ‘Tis Geordie Will, the vulgarian!
I think I’m more likely to find a non-inflatable woman in my bed than a comment appear here in defence of Mad B.
Bet they all take the piss out of him at training when he parks that hatchback next to their Aston Martins.
Very well said my fellow late stopper upper.
From now on my middle name is Vulgaar. With the ‘a’ pronounced double length(no spelling mistook from me) ‘cos it makes me sound more sophistimacated and exotic.
Surely, what Chris found ‘exciting’ was the argument about Enlightenment, not Bunting’s guff. And he’s also right to think it’s a debate that’s timely and worth having ??
If someone wrote an article in a newspaper pointing out the limitations of calculus in tackling a whole range of contemporary problems in the mathematical modelling of natural processes it might rightly lead to an “exciting” debate—for those of a scientific/mathematical/technical persuasion.
If someone wrote an article challenging those who value or invoke “Newtonian physics” because Newton believed in all sorts of mystic shit, or because he stole some of his ideas, or because his notation was unwieldy, or because his laws of motion underpin ballistic missile technology (all of which at least, unlike many of MB’s assertions about the Enlightenment, are true) then the painful process of explaining to the author of this piece his/her manifold stupidities or even clarifying the terms (s)he misused would not be interesting at all.
The current “clash of civilizations” will be won by people and technologies. Academics will retrospectively devise a story to explain how the result wasn’t so much about the superiority or inferiority of weapons, lifestyles, or outcomes, but about the superiority or inferiority of systems of thought. They will be wrong. Victory will go to the people with the best shiny things and the willingness to use them in a calculated way.