As I’ll be out much of the day, slurping down pho and other Vietnamese goodies, I’ll just mention two books that I’m reading (this is also a time for you to recommend books) and then give a list of four or five articles I’ve read recently that might interest you. All the screenshots will link to the pieces.

What I’m reading now. I usually do one book at a time, but I am now reading two, and am about 2/3 of the way through both of them.

First, this one, for I am a sucker for the Courtier’s Reply. It doesn’t say much beyond what Goff’s papers say: panpsychists tend to use the same arguments over and over again, perhaps hoping that repetition will convince people that materialism—I call it “naturalism”—is wrong and that every particle on Earth has some form of consciousness. I haven’t yet bought the theory, and can’t imagine that I will, but I’m puzzled why so many people, including Annaka Harris and Philip Pullman (they blurbed Goff’s book) find it alluring. To me panpsychism is a religion, not science, and not even wrong.

Nevertheless, I am persisting. There’s a new breed of philosopher, of which Goff is one, who, irked by the advances of science (in his case, neuroscience), try to mount a defense that the truth about nature (in his case, the origin of consciousness), can be found by rumination alone without any need to consult nature or do experiments. They are wrong.

Below: a much better book. Having read several biographies of T. E. Lawrence (“Lawrence of Arabia”), watched the eponymous movie several times (one of the best films of all time!), and read Lawrence’s uneven Seven Pillars of Wisdom, I am a sucker for any material on Lawrence. I admire him because he was both a scholar and a man of action, which reminds me that that is what I should have been but wasn’t.

This book, a bestseller, diverges from normal Lawrence biography because it sets his activities within the politics and battles of World War I in Arabia, and also has two other main characters, Aaron Aaronsohn and William Yale). It’s also extremely well written but also minutely researched, with a lot of material I didn’t know. I recommend it highly if you’re into this period of history:

 

Now: recommended reading (click on screenshots):

In the Spectator Douglas Murray recommends four works that every free-speech advocate should read. It’s a very short piece.

Reader Rick sent this article from The Big Think. While it’s a tad self-congratulatory, and I don’t know most of the research cited, it at least gives us some ammunition to counter the claim that atheists are nihilistic people lacking a moral foundation.

The much demonized and often de-platformed Heather Mac Donald has a good piece in Quillette decrying Yale’s elimination of its Introduction to Fine Art course, which has been deep-sixed as a required course and then revamped to be a woke course. (Mac Donald took the course when she was an undergraduate English major at Yale.) In January I wrote about Yale’s abominable act.

Yale is becoming a school to make fun of, for its administrators are so woke that they’re destroying the school’s quality in order to flaunt its supposed virtue. (h/t: Luana).

An excerpt, which scares me about my own university (my emphasis):

The one-sided subjection of Western civilization to the petty tyranny of identity politics will only worsen. Yale is one of four universities to have received a $4 million grant to infuse the theme of race into every aspect of humanities teaching and scholarship. Brown, the University of Chicago, and Stanford are the other recipients of that Andrew W. Mellon Foundation bequest. (The Mellon Foundation, once a supporter of apolitical humanities scholarship, has been captured by the identitarian Left.) Race, Yale announced in its press release about the Mellon grant, is critically important and indisputably central to the humanities.

Actually, it is not. The humanities are about matters far more compelling than the trivialities of race, which in any case we are supposed to believe is not even real. For centuries, poets, painters, novelists, and architects sought to express essential truths about the human condition. Race may have played a role in a few classic works, such as Othello or The Heart of Darkness, but it was hardly “central” to the entire tradition. Those who seek to make it so do so in the pursuit of political grievance, not scholarly accuracy.

Some students know better, however. Once word got out that this year would be the curtain call for the two introductory Western art courses, students stampeded to enroll. Though the courses were not in fact a required gateway into the study of art history, it would have been perfectly appropriate to make them so. The primary obligation of education is to pass on a particular civilization’s cultural inheritance with love and gratitude. Yale, like nearly every other college today, has lost the will to do so. It has therefore negated its very reason for being.

And for fun (and historical interest in Honorary Cats®, we have this article from Atlas Obscura sent by reader Don:

If you want to see Ben Franklin’s poem on the ex-squirrel, go here.

There are some nice illustrations, too, like this Portrait of a Lady with a Squirrel and a Starling by Hans Holbein:

And a bonus video just in from reader Bryan. Mark Rober, the videomaker, tries all kind of plant-based burgers (“Impossible burgers”) and then serves them to Bill Gates (he likes them). I have to say: this makes me want to try these things. This video has been up only 3 days and currently has nearly 7 million views!