The book of absolutes: A critique of relativism and a defence of universals

The Book of Absolutes: A Critique of Relativism and a Defence of Universals

Volumn , Issue , 2008, Pages 1-398

  Gairdner, William D ^a  

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References (514)

1. In Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (New York: Viking Penguin, 2002), there is a thorough examination of these self-serving modern concepts. Pinker draws various conclusions I would not about the origins of mind, but nevertheless, it is refreshing after a century of assumptions about blank-slate psychology to see such a thorough examination of the idea.
2. Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Home University Library, 1959 and 1972).
3. Plato, Theaetetus, in John M. Cooper and D.S. Hutchinson, eds, Plato: Complete Works (Indianapolis, in: Hackett, 1997), 169.
4. Some historians have said that Protagoras did not mean that all things are relative. Rather, he meant that Man (humankind), not nature, is the primary object of human study. And so his was a doctrine of humanism, not of relativism. On this point, see the entry for "Relativity of Knowledge" in The Enclyclopaedia Britannica, 11th ed., vol. 23. However, Plato cites the full argument by Protagoras, which is clearly relativist.
5. On the question of pandemic public ignorance, see, for example, the journal Critical Review 14, nos 2-3 (Summer 2000). This same journal published yet another collection of papers on the same topic, vol. 18, nos 1-3 (Winter-Summer 2006).
6. David Berlinski, Newton's Gift: How Sir Isaac Newton Unlocked the System of the World (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000), xiv. This is an intriguing and accessible account of Newton's life, work, and significance.
7. Margaret Geller, via Jeffrey Satinover, The Quantum Brain (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 2001), 4
8. quoted in S. Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992), 225.
9. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (London: Penguin, 1985), 120.
10. See especially Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (New York: Viking Penguin, 2002).
11. J.L. Talmon, Romanticism and Revolt (New York: Norton, 1967), 100, my emphasis.
12. Michael Krausz and Jack M. Meiland, eds, Relativism, Cognitive and Moral (Notre Dame, IL: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982), 7.
13. Roger Sandall, The Culture Cult: Designer Tribalism and Other Essays (New York: Westview Press, 2001), 107-8.
14. Paul Johnson, Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Eighties (New York: Harper and Row, 1983), 4, my emphasis.
15. Renato Rosaldo, "Of Headhunters and Soldiers: Separating Cultural and Ethical Relativism," conference paper, www.scu.edu/ethics/publications/iie/v11n1/relativism.html.
16. William Turner, The History of Philosophy (New York: Ginn and Company, 1903), 600.
17. See the entry for "Relativity of Knowledge" in The Encylopaedia Britannica, 11th ed., vol. 23.
18. Maurice Mandelbaum, "Subjective, Objective, and Conceptual Relativism," in Michael Kraus and Jack M. Meiland, eds, Relativism, Cognitive and Moral (Notre Dame, IL: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982), 31.
19. Plato, Theaetetus, in John M. Cooper and D.S. Hutchinson, eds, Plato: Complete Works (Indianapolis, in: Hackett, 1997), 190.
20. Aristotle, The Metaphysics (London: Penguin Classics, 1998), see especially books 3 through 7.
21. I thank Professor Allen Wood for his carefully argued paper "Relativism," which lays out many of the points adapted in these objections to relativism; see www.people.cornell.edu/pagesrcc2/relativism.
22. Ernest Gellner, Anthropology and Politics: Revolutions in the Sacred Grove (London: Blackwell, 1995), 4.
23. W.T. Stace, Religion and the Modern Mind (New York: J.P. Lippincott, 1952), 118-19.
24. See William D. Gairdner, "Freedom, Democracy, Slavery," chapter 2 in The Trouble with Democracy, 41-86 (Toronto: Stoddart, 2001), for an extensive examination of the moral conundrums presented by ancient as well as modern slavery.
25. David Berlinski, Newton's Gift: How Sir Isaac Newton Unlocked the System of the World (New York Simon and Schuster, 2000), xv, my emphasis.
26. Robert B. Edgerton, Sick Societies: Challenging the Myth of Primitive Harmony (New York: Free Press, 1992), offers an interesting review of cultural relativism by a former relativist as well as a wealth of historical and contemporary insight into the health and sickness of a wide range of societies, past and present. The evidence offered here is sufficient in itself to make a mockery of cultural relativism.
27. Wood, "Relativism."
28. Stanton Evans, The Theme Is Freedom: Religion, Politics, and the American Tradition (Washington, dc: Regnery, 1994), 43.
29. Oliver Wendell Holmes, "Natural Law," Harvard Law Review, no. 40 (1918): 252.
30. Margaret Mead, Coming of Age in Samoa (1928; reprint, New York: Penguin, 1966).
31. These and a number of other questions are neatly put by Kelley L. Ross, PhD, at www.friesian.com/relativie.
32. These objections by Ernest Gellner are reviewed in one of the most thoroughgoing critiques of relativism in the fields of history and anthropology I have seen: Keith Windschuttle, The Killing of History (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 1996), 30ff.
33. Sir Edmund Leach, quoted in Robert B. Edgerton, Sick Societies: Challenging the Myth of Primitive Harmony (New York: Free Press, 1992), 23, my emphasis.
34. This general discussion of the nature and rise of cultural relativism in the West is indebted to the works of Donald E. Brown, Human Universals (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1991);
35. Carl N. Degler, In Search of Human Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991);
36. Elvin Hatch, Culture and Morality: The Relativity of Values in Anthropology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983);
37. Edgerton, Sick Societies;
38. Roger Sandall, The Culture Cult: Designer Tribalism and Other Essays (Boulder, co: Westview Press, 2001);
39. Adam Kuper, Culture: The Anthropologists' Account (Cambridge, ma: Harvard Unversity Press, 1999);
40. Ernest Gellner, Anthropology and Politics: Revolutions in the Sacred Grove (London: Blackwell, 1995);
41. Ernest Gellner, Postmodernism, Reason and Religion (London: Routledge, 1992).
42. Henry Commager, quoted in Hatch, Culture and Morality, 30.
43. Sandall, Culture Cult, 53-4.
44. See especially Edwin Black, War against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2003).
45. Brown, Human Universals, 55.
46. On the matter of the creed of scientific neutrality popular among the original Boasians, see in particular Hatch, Culture and Morality, 46, 47, 80.
47. These thoughts, from Stanford University professor Renato Rosaldo, one of the newer breed of "committed anthropologists," are presented in "Of Headhunters and Soldiers: Separating Cultural and Ethical Relativism," a conference paper available at www.scu.edu/ethics/publications/iie/v11n1/relativism.html.
48. Brown, Human Universals, 56.
49. Degler, In Search of Human Nature, 82-3.
50. Edgerton, Sick Societies, 37.
51. Margaret Mead, quoted in Carolyn Warner, ed., The Last Word: A Treasury of Women's Quotes (New York: Prentice Hall, 1992).
52. See Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1934);
53. Margaret Mead, Coming of Age in Samoa (1928; reprint, New York: Penguin, 1966).
54. Brown, Human Universals, 2.
55. Sandall, Culture Cult, 60.
56. Quoted in Brown, Human Universals, 84.
57. E.B. Tylor, Primitive Culture (New York: Harper, 1958), 539.
58. See especially Gellner, Anthropology and Politics.
59. Degler, In Search of Human Nature, 134.
60. My emphasis. See www.panam.edu/faculty/mglazer/theory/cultural_relativism.htm.
61. A compressed explanation of the ethical division and confusion among anthropologists is Murray L. Wax, "Some Issues and Sources on Ethics in Anthroplogy," written for the American Anthropological Association's website, at www.aaanet.org/committees/ethics/ch1.htm.
62. Kurt von Fritz, quoted in Hatch, Culture and Morality, 98.
63. See Wax, "Some Issues."
64. Richard Dawkins, River out of Eden (New York: Harper Collins, 1995).
65. John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, "The Psychological Foundations of Culture," in Jerome H. Barkow, Leda Cosmides, and John Tooby, eds, The Adpated Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 92.
66. Edgerton, Sick Societies, 2.
67. Walter Goldschmidt, cited in Brown, Human Universals, 76.
68. Physicist Charles Nissam-Sabat, quoted in Edgerton, Sick Societies, 27.
69. B.F. Skinner, Verbal Behavior (New York: Methuen, 1957). Chomsky published Syntactic Structures (The Hague: Mouton) in 1957 and there explored concepts of underlying deep structures of human language, of "transformational grammar," and of "universal grammar." The latter theme is more developed in his Language and Problems of Knowledge (Cambridge, ma: mit Press, 1988).
70. Lionel Tiger and Robin Fox, The Imperial Animal (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971).
71. E.O. Wilson, On Human Nature (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1978).
72. E.O. Wilson, Sociobiology: The Abridged Edition (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1980).
73. See Degler, In Search of Human Nature, ch. 9, for a thorough rendering of this trend.
74. The view was growing then that relativism contained "an insidious bias toward the status quo and in favour of the preservation of foreign or exotic cultures, as human zoos, or as anthropological specimens" (Hatch, Culture and Morality, 116).
75. Cloudcuckooland: The Postmodern Folks. Following this-and still with us in a confused way-came "postmodern" anthropology. It became critical even of the Geertzian school because Geertz still believed there is a truth (however subjective and literary) to be obtained.
76. For postmodernists, however, there is no truth, only fictions, or fabricated "narratives," about other cultures. There can be no unequivocal interpretations because all cultures are contested from within, and there are no privileged readers.
77. People of every culture (culture is now a suspect, "hegemonic" word) live in a world of symbols. Every culture is its own system of symbols.
78. So by and large, these folks "have switched their allegiance from the social sciences to the humanities, and they are likely to practice interpretation, even deconstruction," rather than science (Kuper, Culture, x; see also 18-20).
79. See www.yale.edu/hraf.
80. Interestingly, Margaret Mead, Clyde Kluckholn, and Alfred Kroeber, three of Boas's most influential student relativists, and all central figures in the establishment of "culture" as the sole explanation of human behaviour to the radical exclusion of biology and all other conceptions of innate "human nature," had all revised their earlier views by the 1950s, by then accepting that biology, or nature, plays an important role in human behaviour.
81. Brown, Human Universals, ch. 6, 130-41.
82. See, for example, Michael R. Matthews, ed., The Scientific Background to Modern Philosophy (Indianapolis, in: Hackett, 1989).
83. see Michael J. Denton, Nature's Destiny (New York: Free Press, 1998), ch. 2.
84. See Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy (1959; reprint, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), esp. chs 9 and 10, which deal specifically with a logical defence of universals.
85. Roger Penrose, The Emperor's New Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 151.
86. A sobering lesson in rigorous thinking about the question of where, exactly, a form, or essence, or general idea exists may be obtained from Etienne Gilson, The Unity of Philosophical Experience (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1937).
87. W.T. Stace, A Critical History of Greek Philosophy (London: Macmillan, 1965), 281-8.
88. David Berlinski, Newton's Gift: How Sir Isaac Newton Unlocked the System of the World (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000), 35.
89. David Bodanis, E=mc2: A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation (New York: Walker and Company, 2000), 262n84, disputes the vaunted greatness (mostly vaunted by Newton, he suggests) of Newton's work at the farm, a view he says is plagued with inaccuracies and some confusion.
90. Berlinski, Newton's Gift, 133.
91. Corey S. Powell, God in the Equation (New York: Free Press, 2002), 28.
92. Berlinski, Newton's Gift, 75, my emphasis.
93. See Henry Margenau and Roy Abraham Varghese, eds, Cosmos, Bios, Theos: Scientists Reflect on Science, God, and the Origins of the Universe, Life and Homo Sapiens (LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1992).
94. See Newton's Scholium on Absolute Space and Time, in Matthews, ed., Scientific Background, in which Newton distinguished absolute from relative space and time.
95. Here is a list, in no particular order, of most of the books consulted for this chapter: W.H. McCrea et al., The Constants of Physics (London: Royal Society, 1983);
96. Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (New York: Bantam books, 1988);
97. Russell McCormmach, Night Thoughts of a Classical Physicist (New York: Avon Books, 1982);
98. Stephen Kellert, In the Wake of Chaos (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993);
99. Keith Ward, God, Chance, and Necessity (Oxford: Oneworld, 1993);
100. Richard Morris, The Nature of Reality: The Universe after Einstein (New York: Noonday Press, 1987);
101. James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science (New York: Penguin, 1987);
102. Alan Lightman and Roberta Brawer, Origins: The Lives and Worlds of Modern Cosmologists (Cambridge ma: Harvard University Press, 1990);
103. Rudy Rucker, Infinity and the Mind (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995);
104. David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order (New York: Routledge, 1980);
105. Stanley L. Jaki, The Absolute Beneath the Relative (Lanham, md: isi Books, 1988);
106. Stanley L. Jaki, Chance or Reality and Other Essays (Lanham, md: isi Books, 1986);
107. Richard Feynman, The Character of Physical Law (1965; reprint, Cambridge, ma: mit Press, 1995);
108. Richard Feynman, Six Easy Pieces (1963; reprint, Cambridge, ma: Perseus Books, 1995);
109. John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986);
110. Albert Einstein, Ideas and Opinions (1954; reprint, New York: Crown, 1982);
111. Albert Einstein and Leopold Infeld, The Evolution of Physics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1938);
112. Albert Einstein, Relativity: The Special and the General Theory (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1961);
113. John Gribbin, Schrödinger's Kittens and the Search for Reality (New York: Little Brown, 1995);
114. Dennis Overbye, Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos (New York: Harper Collins, 1991);
115. Nick Herbert, Quantum Reality: Beyond the New Physics (New York: Doubleday, 1985);
116. Paul Davies, The Accidental Universe (Cambridge, uk: Cambridge University Press, 1982); and
117. Jonathan Powers, Philosophy and the New Physics (London: Methuen, 1982).
118. Powell, God, 18, 29.
119. John D. Barrow, The Constants of Nature: From Alpha to Omega-The Numbers That Encode the Deepest Secrets of the Universe (New York: Pantheon, 2002), 51-2.
120. Tony Rothman, Everything's Relative, and Other Fables from Science and Technology (New Jersey: John Wiley and Sons, 2003), 68.
121. Rothman, Everything's Relative, 68.
122. Powers, Philosophy, 92.
123. Rothman, Everything's Relative, 69.
124. Albert Einstein, quoted in Bodanis, E=mc2, 261. Einstein complained to an art historian eager to show the parallel between modern Cubist art and the new physics that "the theory of relativity has been incorrectly understood" and that modern artistic language has "nothing in common with the theory of relativity."
125. Einstein, Ideas and Opinions, 282.
126. On this topic, see Christopher Herbert, Victorian Relativity: Radical Thought and Scientific Discovery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).
127. Cited in Stanley L. Jaki, "The Absolute Beneath the Relative: Reflections on Einstein's Theories," in Absolute Beneath the Relative, 4. This essay is a tidy summary of misunderstandings on relativity.
128. Bodanis, E=mc2, 261, original emphasis.
129. Jaki, Absolute Beneath the Relative, 8.
130. Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything (Toronto: Doubleday, 2003), writes (without a source) that the actual quote was: "It seems hard to sneak a look at God's cards. But that He plays dice and uses 'telepathic' methods... is something that I cannot believe for a single moment" (139).
131. Powell, God, 44.
132. Davies, Accidental Universe, 9.
133. Paul Davies, God and the New Physics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983), 221.
134. Feynman, Character of Physical Law, 58. This famous series of lectures was first published in 1965 and has gone through twenty-two printings.
135. Davies, Accidental Universe, 1.
136. Bryson, Short History, 104. Bryson's book is a good layman's read, for he has a knack for the sort of telling vignette such as used here.
137. Feynman, Character of Physical Law, 30-1.
138. Feynman, Six Easy Pieces, 110, my emphasis.
139. Bryson, Short History, 125.
140. Barrow, Constants of Nature, 49.
141. Davies, Accidental Universe, 77.
142. Overbye, Lonely Hearts, 212.
143. Davies, Accidental Universe, 10.
144. Paul Dirac, quoted in Barrow, Constants of Nature, 101, 102.
145. Fred Hoyle, quoted in Paul Davies, The Mind of God: The Scientific Basis for a Rational World (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), 199.
146. These comments about the old and new stories of science are adapted from Robert M. Augros and George N. Stanciu, The New Story of Science (Lake Bluff, IL: Regnery Gateway, 1984).
147. Max Born, quoted ., 4-5.
148. John Eccles, quoted in ., 171.
149. Jeffrey Satinover, The Quantum Brain (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 2001)
150. Nick Herbert, Elemental Mind: Human Consciousness and the New Physics (New York: Penguin, 1994). Satinover goes further than Penrose toward showing, or at least strongly suggesting, that the mechanical view of the mind as a machine or computer is outdated. The mind operates-indeed, thrives-on the multilevel and original organization of its own essential chaos, and this is what gives us the sense of the mental freedom we enjoy. Herbert explores many angles and theories concerning the possible nonmateriality of mind.
151. Bryson, Short History, 134.
152. John Caiazza, "Natural Right and the Re-discovery of Design in Contemporary Cosmology," The Political Science Reviewer 25 (1996): 291.
153. Freeman Dyson, quoted in Augros and Stanciu, New Story, 69, my emphasis.
154. Barrow and Tipler, Anthropic, 4, my emphasis.
155. Augros and Stanciu, New Story, 70.
156. Barrow and Tipler, Anthropic, 5, my emphasis.
157. Feynman, Six Easy Pieces, 20.
158. Francis S. Collins, The Language of God (New York: Free Press, 2006), 73. Collins, speaking from his perspective as a brilliant and prestigious scientist who is also a theist, has upset a lot of materialist colleagues.
159. I have drawn a number of these examples from Walter Bradley, "The Just So Universe," in William Dembski and James Kushiner, eds, Signs of Intelligence (Grand Rapids, mi: Brazos Press, 2001), 157-70.
160. Augros and Stanciu, New Story, 156-7.
161. Erwin Schrödinger, quoted in ., 157.
162. Fred Hoyle, quoted in Davies, Accidental Universe, 118, my emphasis. Readers interested in the rather extraordinary number of physical phenomena that are exactly favourable to biological life on earth are encouraged to read John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler, "The Anthropic Principle and Biochemistry," in Anthropic. A book that gathers together a plethora of such favourable circumstances and "coincidences" is Denton, Nature's Destiny. He writes with a religious bent, and this makes some of his arguments circular, but the raw science he pulls together to illustrate the "fitness" and fine-tuning of our environment is impressive.
163. Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952).
164. Ullica Segerstråle, in Defenders of the Truth: The Sociobiology Debate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 392, writes that Stephen Chorover, a member of the Sociobiology Study Group, a collection of liberals who ganged up for an attack on E.O. Wilson after his publication of Sociobiology, thought of the war over biology this engendered as "part of the great struggle between free will and determinism." According to him, she goes on, "the social mythology underlying sociobiological theorizing could be traced all the way back to Genesis and the doctrine of original sin, and precedents to the sociobiological debate could be found throughout Church history."
165. Andrew Brown, The Darwin Wars: The Scientific Battle for the Soul of Man (London: Simon and Schuster: 1999), 4, my emphasis.
166. William Hamilton, quoted in ., 11.
167. Edwin Black, War against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2003).
168. John B. Watson, Behaviorism (New York: Norton, 1925), 25.
169. From "Found the 'secret of life,'" Sir Francis Crick's obituary in Canada's National Post, 30 July 2004.
170. Rudi Rummel, Death by Government (New Jersey: Transaction, 1994).
171. Renato Rosaldo, "Of Headhunters and Soldiers: Separating Ethical and Cultural Relativism," at www.scu.edu/ethics/publications/iie/v11n1/relativism.html.
172. Konrad Lorenz, On Aggression (London: Methuen, 1960);
173. Robert Ardrey, The Territorial Imperative (New York: Atheneum, 1966);
174. Desmond Morris, The Naked Ape (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967);
175. Lionel Tiger and Robin Fox, The Imperial Animal (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971).
176. See especially chapter 9, "Biology Redivivus," in Carl N. Degler, In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).
177. Edward O. Wilson, Sociobiology: The Abridged Edition (Cambridge ma: Harvard University Press, 1980), 4.
178. Ullica Segerstråle, Defenders of the Truth: The Sociology Debate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
179. Wilson, Sociobiology, 4.
180. E.O. Wilson, On Human Nature (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1978), 1.
181. Richard Lewontin, quoted in a fascinating article by Tom Bethell, "Agnostic Evolutionists: The Taxonomic Case against Darwin," in Harper's magazine, February 1985.
182. A fascinating read by a pretty rigorous thinker, from whose book I have drawn these examples of the overly sophisticated human brain, is Stephen M. Barr, Modern Physics and Ancient Faith (Notre Dame, in: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003), 197.
183. The following books provide a starter kit on the evolution debate: William A. Demski, ed., Uncommon Dissent: Intellectuals Who Find Darwinism Unconvincing (Wilmington, DE: isi Books, 2004);
184. Phillip E. Johnson, Darwin on Trial (Washington, dc: Regnery Gateway, 1991);
185. Michael J. Behe, Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution (New York: Free Press, 1996);
186. Percival Davis, Dean H. Kenyon, and Charles B. Thaxton, Of Pandas and People: The Central Questions of Biological Origins (1989; reprint, Dallas: Haughton, 1993);
187. Lee Spetner, Not by Chance: Shattering the Modern Theory of Evolution (New York: Judaica Press, 1997);
188. Michael Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (Bethesda, md: Adler and Adler, 1985);
189. Jonathan Wells, Icons of Evolution (Washington, dc: Regnery, 2000). These books are full of further references. Readers may also go to Discovery Institute at www.discovery.org/csc for more information on the Darwin Wars.
190. Wilson, On Human Nature, 1, my emphasis.
191. Wilson, Sociobiology, 300.
192. Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976).
193. Richard Dawkins, "Why I Am a Secular Humanist," in Free Inquiry 18, no. 18 (1997)
194. John Alcock, The Triumph of Sociobiology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 215.
195. "Religion, group affiliation at root of conflicts," www.purify,ind.com/IV9.htm, interview with Richard Dawkins at his home in Oxford after
196. Wilson, Sociobiology, 127.
197. Edward O. Wilson, "Can Biology Do Better than Faith," New Scientist, 2 November 2005.
198. The theory developed by Geoffrey B. West and his colleagues looks at such things as the structural and functional properties of vertebrate cardiovascular and respiratory systems, plant vascular systems, insect tracheal tubes, and other distribution networks. In particular, the theory seeks to explain the origins and ubiquity of a set of mathematical laws known as the quarter-power scaling laws as they apply to plants and animals. According to West, "life is the most complex physical system in the universe. Beyond natural selection, genetic codes and the like there are hardly any general principles or laws that we know that it obeys. Scaling laws are the exception. These are quantitative laws and, remarkably, they are absurdly simple given you are dealing with the most complex of systems." the Los Alamos Laboratory website: www.lanl.gov/orgs/sr/biology.shtml. Also
199. James H. Brown and Geoffrey B. West, Scaling in Biology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). An elegantly written and influential precursor to this approach is D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson, On Growth and Form (Cambridge, uk: Cambridge University Press, 1961).
200. Wilson, On Human Nature, 20-1.
201. Alcock, Triumph of Sociobiology, 76.
202. Of assistance for this section has been Lauralee Sherwood, Fundamentals of Physiology: A Human Perspective (New York: West Publishing, 1995). Her first chapter, which is indicative of the focus of this textbook, is entitled "Homeostasis: The Foundation of Physiology."
203. Wilson, Sociobiology, 284, my emphasis.
204. Wilson, On Human Nature, 34-5.
205. Alcock, Triumph of Sociobiology, 201.
206. See William D. Gairdner, "Democracy against Community," in The Trouble with Democracy (Toronto: Stodart, 2001), 345-87.
207. Leda Cosmides, John Tooby, and Jerome H. Barkow, "Introduction: Evolutionary Psychology and Conceptual Integration," in Jerome H. Barkow, Leda Cosmides, and Tooby, eds, The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 5.
208. David Buss, "Evolutionary Psychology: A New Paradigm for Psychological Science," Psychological Inquiry 6, no. 1 (1995): 85.
209. Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, "Evolutionary Psychology: A Primer" (2004), 12, www.psych.ucsb.edu/researchcep/primer.html.
210. John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, "The Psychological Foundations of Culture," which is the first chapter of the seminal collection of essays The Adapted Mind, cited above at note 29.
211. Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, "Evolutionary Psychology: A Primer" (2004), which can be downloaded, along with much other useful material, from the website for the Center for Evolutionary Psychology, University of California at Santa Barbara: www.psych.ucsb.edu/research/cep/primer.html.
212. Cosmides, Tooby, and Barkow, "Introduction," 115.
213. David Buss, Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind (New York: Pearson Education, 2004).
214. Stephen M. Colarelli and Joseph R. Dettmann, "Intuitive Evolutionary Perspectives in Marketing Practices," available at www.chsbs.edu/stephen_ colarelli.
215. See William D. Gairdner, The War against the Family (Toronto: Stoddart, 1992), esp. ch. 9, "Looking after Their Bodies."
216. Donald Symons, The Evolution of Human Sexuality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 301.
217. Reported in Canada's National Post, 6 May 2004.
218. See an analysis of both magazines in Symons, Evolution, 174ff.
219. Glenn Wilson, The Great Sex Divide: A Study of Male-Female Differences (Washington, dc: Scott-Townsend, 1992), which offers a clear and concise summary of Symons's foundational ideas. Some work has been saved in this chapter by drawing from Wilson's clear summary of the basics of the evolutionist "parental investment" theory from Symons's book.
220. For something more recent that surveys the whole field, see David C. Geary, Male, Female: The Evolution of Human Sex Differences (Washington, dc: American Psychological Association, 1998).
221. Symons, Evolution, 24.
222. L.A. Kirkendall, quoted in ., 218.
223. Two of the earliest books to blow the whistle on the homosexual lifestyle are Alan Bell and Martin Weinberg, Homosexualities (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978)
224. Karla Jay and Allen Young, The Gay Report (New York: Summit Books, 1977).
225. Symons, Evolution, 297.
226. JoAnn Deak, from her speech "Taking the Mean out of Teen," cited in Anne Marie Owens, "Boys Brains Are from Mars" (The Catholic Education Resource Center, 2003).
227. Alcock, Triumph of Sociobiology, 150.
228. Anne Moir and David Jessel, Brain Sex: The Real Difference between Men and Women (London: Mandarin, 1991);
229. Melvin Konner, The Tangled Wing: Biological Constraints on the Human Spirit (New York: Henry Holt, 2002).
230. In Noam Chomsky, Reflections on Language (New York: Pantheon, 1975), 132, we also read: "The principle that human nature, in its psychological aspects, is nothing more than a product of history and given social relations removes all barriers to coercion and manipulation by the powerful."
231. J.R. Urdry, quoted in Wilson, Great Sex Divide, 37.
232. Eleanor Maccoby and Carol Jacklin, The Psychology of Sex Differences (Stanford, ca: Stanford University Press, 1974), is by two avowed feminist scholars who reached their conclusions gingerly but found themselves forced by the copious evidence to admit a number of innate sex differences. Moir and Jessel, Brain Sex, is an early display of this reality. Wilson, Great Sex Divide, is a very readable treatment of the biochemical and experimental evidence for innate sex differences.
233. Robert L. Nadeau, S/He Brain (Westport, ct: Praeger, 1996), is a review of the underlying biochemical and neuro-scientific findings about sex differences, nested in some appropriately targeted political objections to feminist ideology. Kimura, Sex and Cognition, is a careful review of the findings to date, somewhat apprehensively expressed. Geary, Male, Female, is a detailed survey of studies on sex differences thought to be rooted in evolutionary theory.
234. Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (New York: Viking Penguin, 2002), is another of Pinker's long, cheerfully confident, and informative books. Pinker, like so many evolutionists today, is a Darwinian fundamentalist whose arguments and evidence exclude even the suggestion that Darwinism is a faith more than a fact.
235. How the Mind Works (New York: Norton, 1997), a resolutely Darwinian argument for what the title claims. Finally, I suggest Konner, Tangled Wing, a nicely written and wide-ranging classic in the field, marred only by occasional heartfelt if naive political innuendo of the egalitarian type.
236. Nadeau, S. He Brain, 59.
237. Maccoby and Jacklin, Psychology of Sex Differences, 142.
238. Wilson, Great Sex Divide, 110.
239. Kimura, Sex and Cognition, 177.
240. Nadeau, S. He Brain, 50.
241. Pinker, Blank Slate, 347.
242. Nadeau, S. He Brain, 52.
243. Wilson, Great Sex Divide, 115ff.
244. Pinker, Blank Slate, 347ff.
245. James Q. Wilson and Richard Herrnstein, Crime and Human Nature (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985).
246. Kimura, Sex and Cognition, 62.
247. Wilson, Great Sex Divide, 100.
248. Nadeau, S. He Brain, 56.
249. Jim Powell, Senior Fellow of the Cato Institute, has written a helpful, brief article, from which I have drawn: "Marcus Tullius Cicero, Who Gave Natural Law to the Modern World," in The Freeman, January 1997.
250. These assumptions are more fleshed out in a fine study by Pauline Westerman, The Disintegration of Natural Law Theory: Aquinas to Finnis (Leiden and New York: Koninklijke Brill, 1998), 12.
251. On this point, see the lucid article by Lloyd Weinreb, "Natural Law and Rights," ch. 10 in Robert P. George, ed., Natural Law Theory (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995).
252. See an excellent article by Stephen Hall, "The Persistent Spectre: Natural Law, International Order and the Limits of Legal Positivism," European Journal of International Law 12, no. 2 (2001): 269-307. The quotations here are from pages 303-4.
253. "World toilet summit declares clean facilities a basic human right," National Post, 18 November 2004.
254. Hadley Arkes, "Reflections on Cicero's Naturalism," in George, ed., Natural Law Theory, 263.
255. See a brief and unsympathetic, but accurate, overview of the criticisms of modern natural law theory in Robert P. George, "Natural Law and Human Nature," in George, ed, Natural Law Theory, 31.
256. For example, John Finnis, in his influential book Natural Law and Natural Right (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980), states proudly that "the argument of this book does not rely, even implicitly, on the term 'human nature'" (50). On the matter of the modern natural law theorists denying that Aquinas ever believed in human nature, see Westerman, Disintegration, 247.
257. See the section on objective natural law, pages 232ff, in E.B.F. Midgley, The Natural Law Tradition and the Theory of International Relations (London: Elek Books, 1975). This point about the innate seeds of the virtues that exist in us prior to the work of reason that makes them acquired virtues is found on page 238, where on the evidence, Midgley dismisses Grisez's argument that Aquinas would have agreed with Hume's argument concerning the lack of any necessary connection between is and ought.
258. Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae: A Concise Translation, ed. Timothy Mcdermott (Chicago: Christian Classics, 1989), sec. 94.6.
259. Charles Grove Haines, The Revival of Natural Law Concepts (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1930), 220
260. Peter J. Stanlis, Edmund Burke and the Natural Law (Lafayette, LA: Huntington House, 1986), 260n5.
261. Roscoe Pound, "The Theory of Judicial Decision," Harvard Law Review 36 (May 1923): 802.
262. Stanlis, Edmund Burke, 6.
263. Roscoe Pound, "The Scope and Purpose of Sociological Jurisprudence," Harvard Law Review 25 (November 1911): 162, quoted in Stanlis, Edmund Burke, 4.
264. Sir William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England (New York, 1832), quoted in Stanlis, Edmund Burke, 253.
265. Hans Kelsen, "Absolutism and Relativism in Philosophy and Politics," American Political Science Review, no. 42 (1948): 906
266. cited in Charles E. Rice, Questions on the Natural Law (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993), 75-9.
267. Russell Hittinger, "Natural Law and Virtue," in George, ed., Natural Law Theory, 67n19.
268. Charles E. Rice, "Natural Law in the Twenty-First Century," in Edward B. Mclean, ed., Common Truths: New Perspectives on Natural Law (Wilmington, DE: isi Books, 2000), 298.
269. Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), 161-2.
270. William D. Gairdner, The Trouble with Democracy (Toronto: Stoddart, 2001).
271. For the broad knowledge held by the American founders, see The Federalist Paper; on the Canadian founders, see Janet Ajzenstat, Paul Romney, Ian Gentles, and William D. Gairdner, Canada's Founding Debates (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003).
272. Rice, 50 Questions, 78.
273. Henrich Rommen, The Natural Law: A Study in Legal and Social History and Philosophy (Indianapolis, in: Liberty Fund, 1998), 16.
274. Here are some recent seminal works on natural law: Yves Simon, The Tradition of Natural Law: A Philosopher's Reflections (New York: Fordham University Press, 1965);
275. Finnis, Natural Law;
276. Rommen, Natural Law;
277. Javier Hervada, Natural Right and Natural Law: A Critical Introduction (Pamplona: University of Navarra, 1987);
278. Michael Bertram Crowe, The Changing Profile of the Natural Law (The Hague: Matrinus Nijhoff, 1977);
279. Henry Veatch, Human Rights: Fact or Fancy? (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985);
280. Russell Hittinger, A Critique of the New Natural Law Theory (Notre Dame, in: University of Notre Dame Press, 1987);
281. Ernest Bloch, Natural Law and Human Dignity, trans. Dennis J. Schmidt (Cambridge, ma: mit Press, 1986);
282. Ernest Bloch, Natural Law and Modern Society (Cleveland, oh: World, 1963);
283. Paul Sigmund, Natural Law in Political Thought (Cambridge, ma: Winthrop, 1971);
284. Ernest Bloch, Light on Natural Law, ed. Illud Evans (Baltimore: Helicon, 1965);
285. E.B.F. Midgley, Natural Law and International Relations (London: Elek, 1975);
286. Jacques Maritain, The Rights of Man and Natural Law (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986);
287. Stanlis, Edmund Burke; and finally, Westerman, Disintegration. The journals The American Journal of Jurisprudence and Vera Lex are both concerned with natural law questions.
288. Rice, 50 Questions, 24, my emphasis. Among others, Rice cites Heinrich Rommen, "Natural Law in Decisions of the Federal Supreme Court and of the Constitutional Courts in Germany," Natural Law Forum 4, no. 26 (1959).
289. Martin Luther King Jr, "Letter from Birmingham Jail," quoted in Rice
290. Questions, 25.
291. "Saddam awaits trial by tending his garden," National Post, 21 September 2004.
292. Richard F. Devlin, "Mapping Legal Theory," in Alberta Law Review 32, no. 3 (1994): 605. Devlin provides an excellent brief review of the varieties of legal theory practised in North America-with an emphasis on the Canadian legal landscape.
293. Robert N. Wilkin, "Cicero and the Law of Nature," in Arthur L. Harding, ed., Origins of the Natural Law Tradition (Dallas: Southern Methodist University, 1954), 15.
294. Blaise Pascal, Pensées (London: Penguin Books, 1966), sec. 15, no. 199, 94.
295. Stephen M. Barr, Modern Physics and Ancient Faith (Notre Dame, in: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003), 197.
296. Robin Collins, "Religion and Science Revisited," an excellent review of Barr, Modern Physics, in First Things, November 2003, 54.
297. This is discussed in chapter 5 of this book, "The Constants of Nature," and far more extensively in Barr, Modern Physics.
298. Cicero, On Moral Duties, 1.4.11, quoted in J. Rufus Fears, "Natural Law: The Legacy of Greece and Rome," in Harding, ed., Origins, 35.
299. Cicero, quoted in Mclean, ed., Common Truths, 34.
300. Aristotle, Metaphysics, trans. and intro. Hugh Lawson-Tancred (London: Penguin, 1998), bk 3, 88.
301. I am indebted to an essay by Ralph McInerny, "Are There Moral Truths That Everyone Knows?" and to several others in the collection by Edward B. Mclean, ed., Common Truths: New Perspectives on Natural Law (Wilmington, de: isi Books, 2000).
302. See especially Jay Budziszewski, What We Can't Not Know (Dallas: Spence, 2003), and also his Written on the Heart: The Case for Natural Law (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1997).
303. What is now called the Public Health Agency of Canada has produced annual reports on hiv and aids for some twenty-five years. The most recent reports can be seen at www.phac-aspc.gc.ca/pphb-dgspsp/hast-vsmt/public_e. html.
304. From the beginning, these have shown that about 80 per cent of all aids cases and deaths in Canada are homosexual males. A summary of the situation can be seen in the "Archive" of my website at www.williamgairdner. com in my article "There Can Be No 'Sex' in Homosexual."
305. Alasdair MacIntyre, "Natural Law in Advanced Modernity," in Harding ed., Origins, 91ff.
306. On many aspects of slavery, ancient and modern, see William D. Gairdner, "Freedom, Democracy, Slavery," ch. 2 in The Trouble with Democracy (Toronto: Stoddart, 2001), 41-86.
307. Stephen Hall, "The Persistent Spectre: Natural Law, International Order and the Limits of Legal Positivism," European Journal of International Law 12, no. 2 (2001): 269-307.
308. Hall, "Persistent Spectre," 269-307.
309. John Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Right (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980), 288.
310. Hall, "Persistent Spectre," 296.
311. This important concession to what Hans Kelsen called the Grundnorm, or normative ground, or again, his conception of "an ultra-minimalist natural law," is found in his General Theory of Law and State, trans. Anders Wedberg (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1945), quoted here in Hall, "Persistent Spectre," 300n133.
312. Jay Budziszewski, Written on the Heart: The Case for Natural Law (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1997), 120.
313. From Dennis Lloyd, The Idea of Law (Middlesex: Penguin, 1964), quoted in Hall, "Persistent Spectre," 300.
314. Roy Wood Sellars and Raymond Bragg, along with thirty-four signatories, Humanist Manifesto I (1933);
315. Paul Kurtz and Edwin H. Wilson, Humanist Manifesto II (1973). Readers will find an analysis of both manifestos in William D. Gairdner, The War against the Family (Toronto: Stoddart, 1992), 250-4.
316. Frans de Waal, Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 9.
317. Robert Wright, The Moral Animal (New York: Random House, 1994), 7-8.
318. Ullica Segerstråle, Defenders of the Truth: The Sociology Debate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 396, original emphasis.
319. Wright, Moral Animal, 37.
320. James Q. Wilson, The Moral Sense (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993).
321. Blaise Pascal, Pensées (London: Penguin Books, 1966), ser. 2, no. 423, 154.
322. Budziszewski, Written on the Heart, 214.
323. Paul Dirac, quoted in Huston Smith, Forgotten Truth: The Primordial Tradition (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), 115.
324. Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy (New York: Harper Collins, 2004). The quotations from Huxley in this paragraph, except the last, are from pages vii-xi.
325. Aldous Huxley, "Introduction to the Bhagavad-Gita, as translated by Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood." This text, in which the four principles that follow also appear, is posted at http://members.tripod.com/~parvati/perennial.html.
326. C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (Glasgow: Collins, 1978), 49.
327. Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy (1912; reprint, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959, 1972).
328. After many years away from this general topic I was refreshed by Keith Windschuttle's The Killing of History (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 1996), in which he gives a hefty critique of the whole unfolding from structuralism to postmodernism to "cultural studies," as well as detailed exposes of the intellectual and moral faults-and frauds-of many of the seminal thinkers in these movements.
329. The edition relied on here is Ferdinand De Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Roy Harris, ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, with Albert Riedlinger (Chicago: Open Court, 1986).
330. John E. Jospeh, Nigel Love, and Talbot J. Taylor, Landmarks in Linguistic Thought (London: Routledge, 2001), 216.
331. Raymond Tallis, Not Saussure: A Critique of Post-Saussurean Literary Theory (London: Macmillan, 1988), 7. This book provides one of the best general critiques of the irresponsible uses made of Saussure's ideas.
332. De Saussure, Course, 24.
333. Noam Chomsky, Syntactic Structures (The Hague: Mouton, 1957).
334. See Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (New York: Viking, 2002), for the best general presentation of this older metaphor for mind.
335. See especially Neil Smith, Chomsky: Ideas and Ideals (1999; reprint, Cambridge, uk: Cambridge University Press, 2004), for the best overview of these debates.
336. Currently, the most reader-friendly survey of the language theory debates is Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct (New York: Harper Collins, 1994). I have difficulties with Pinker's evolutionary biologism, but the book is a useful survey of the debates nonetheless.
337. Claude Levi-Strauss, Les structures élémentaires de la parenté (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1949), translated by J.H. Belland J.R. von Sturmer as The Elementary Structures of Kinship, ed. R. Needham (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969).
338. De Saussure, Course, 68, my emphasis.
339. Tallis, Not Saussure, 69.
340. The classic text that led the field for a half-century, although it is now much critiqued, is Benjamin Lee Whorf, Language, Thought, and Reality (Cambridge, ma: mit Press, 1956).
341. Roland Barthes, Sur Racine (Paris: Club francais du livre, 1960; Editions du Seuil, 1963); and in English, Roland Barthes, On Racine, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964).
342. Frank Lentricchia, After the New Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 116, my emphasis.
343. See William D. Gairdner, "The Structure of the Unknown," in The Critical Wager (Toronto: ecw Press, 1982), 132-55. Looking back, I would say that structuralism as a method has made enduring contributions to the study of actual languages, kin systems, folk tales, and many other already-formulaic systems of communication. With respect to more complicated and nuanced "languages," however, such as complex literary forms, poetry, the novel, and most intricate artefacts of higher culture, it has been as unproductive as it has been imaginative.
344. Roland Barthes, "The Death of the Author," in Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 142-8.
345. Tallis, Not Saussure, 48, lays this out in a similar way.
346. Peter Viereck, Metapolitics: From the Romantics to Hitler (New York: Knopf, 1941), 5.
347. Friedrich Nietzsche, entry #244, "People and Fatherlands," in Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Michael Tanner, ed. R.J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin Classic, 1973), 175, my emphasis.
348. Viereck, Metapolitics, 33.
349. Gene Edward Veith Jr, Modern Fascism: Liquidating the Judeo-Christian Worldview (St Louis: Concordia, 1993), 81.
350. See also his Postmodern Times (Wheaton, IL: Crossways Books, 1993). Both books provide handy overviews of their subjects.
351. I am indebted to Richard Wolin for his two books: Heidegger's Children (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001)
352. The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). Both are a feast of detail and argument. My remarks are drawn mostly from the latter and are somewhat of a partial summary of his excellent writing on Heidegger's thought and politics.
353. This phrase is from Geoffrey Clive, ed., The Philosophy of Nietzsche (New York: Mentor Books, New American Library, 1965), xxiv.
354. Michael Tanner, "Introduction," in Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Tanner, ed. Hollingdale, 9.
355. Tanner, "Introduction," 10.
356. Clive, ed., Philosophy of Nietzsche, xxiv.
357. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Marianne Cowan (Henry Regnery: Chicago, 1955), secs 4 to 6.
358. Geoffrey Clive, "Introduction," in Geoffrey Clive, ed., The Philosophy of Nietzsche (New York: Mentor, 1965), xix.
359. Friedrich Nietzsche, "Preface," in Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Tanner, ed. Hollingdale, 31-2.
360. Wolin, Seduction of Unreason, 48ff.
361. Tanner, "Introduction," 25.
362. Wolin, Heidegger's Children, 32.
363. Friedrich Nietzsche, Being and Time (1933), trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1962).
364. Richard Wolin, "Being and Time: A Failed Masterpiece?" in Heidegger's Children, 203-32.
365. Veith Jr, Modern Fascism, 89.
366. Wolin, Heidegger's Children, 175.
367. Richard Polt explains such concepts clearly in Heidegger: An Introduction (Ithica, ny: Cornell University Press, 1999), ch. 2, 8-22.
368. Wolin, Heidegger's Children, 186, original emphasis.
369. Most who have a speaking knowledge of Heidegger's work consider him to be a product, or at least a continuation, of Western philosophy, for they regard his existential roots as thoroughly "Western." There is, however, a great deal of fascinating material discussing Heidegger's debt to Eastern thinkers. Readers may wish to begin with such as Reinhard May, Heidegger's Hidden Sources (New York: Routledge, 1996);
370. Fred Dallmayr, The Other Heidegger (Ithica, ny: Cornell University Press, 1993);
371. Michael E. Zimmerman, "Heidegger, Buddhism, and Deep Ecology," The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger (Cambridge, uk: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Heidegger's love of the Eastern ideal of achieving a selfless coincidence with Being is everywhere evident, and this must surely strike us as peculiar for a philosopher who claimed all his life that our salvation can arise only from our own personal (and ethnic-national) existential and historical tradition.
372. The lectures given there were subsequently published and are still available in all their earnest obscurity in Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato, eds, The Structuralist Controversy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970).
373. Jacques Derrida's unnecessarily obtuse but seminal essay "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," in which the arrival of poststructuralism was announced, is at pages 247-65.
374. See Frank Lentricchia, After the New Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), for a general overview of deconstruction and postmodern thought, although not one that itself escapes criticism.
375. His rendering of Derrida's subversive appearance, among other matters, is detailed in ch. 5, "History or the Abyss: Poststructuralism," 156-209.
376. In a work of luminous rationality, John M. Ellis, Against Deconstruction (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1989), mortally exposes the weaknesses of postmodern thought in general and of some of its explicators, including Lentricchia.
377. See www.cspeirce.com, 21-1903-C.P.5-138, Lowell Lectures V.
378. For an inventory of Peirce's definitions (and twelve further definitions!), readers may go to http://members.net/arisbe/menu/library/sources/76defs.htm.
379. Lentricchia, After the New Criticism, 164.
380. Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, French Philosophy of the Sixties: An Essay on Antihumanism (Amherst, ma: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990), 122.
381. Quoted in Loren Goldner, "The Nazis and Deconstruction: Jean-Pierre Faye's Demolition of Derrida," http://home.earthlink.net/~lrgoldner/faye.html.
382. Ferry and Renaut, After the New Criticism, 19-20.
383. Keith Windschuttle, The Killing of History: How Literary Critics and Social Theorists Are Murdering Our Past (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 1996), 202, my emphasis.
384. Ferry and Renaut, After the New Criticism, 69.
385. Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), xxiv.
386. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977 (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 81.
387. Foucault, quoted in Joseph Carroll, Evolution and Literary Theory (Columbia, ms: University of Missouri Press, 1995), 3, my emphasis.
388. Stanley Fish, Doing What Comes Naturally (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1989), 214.
389. Fish is by far the most lucid defender of anti-foundationalism, especially in this book's essay "Anti-Foundationalism, Theory Hope, and the Teaching of Composition," 342-55.
390. Windschuttle, Killing of History, 151ff.
391. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Vintage, 1973).
392. Andrew Scull, "Scholarship of Fools," Times Literary Supplement, 23 March 2007.
393. Carroll, Evolution, 3.
394. At any rate, logic and the syllogism have their uses, but as Ambrose Bierce points out in his Devil's Dictionary (New York: Hill and Wang, 1957), 108, the fact that it takes one man sixty seconds to dig a post hole does not mean that sixty men can dig a post hole in one second. However, all of this detracts only in minor ways from Carroll's energetic send-up of postmodernism.
395. Carroll, Evolution, 413.
396. Windschuttle, Killing of History, 135.
397. For a taste of the bitterly antinomian life of Michel Foucault, see Mark Lilla, The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics (New York: New York Review of Books, 2004);
398. for insight into Foucault's shoddy scholarship, see Windschuttle, Killing of History, esp, ch. 5
399. "The Discourses of Michel Foucault: Poststructuralism and Anti-Humanism," 131-71.
400. Mark Goldblatt, "Dangerous Thinkers: 20th Century Philosophers' Love Affair with Totalitarianism," a review of Mark Lilla's The Reckless Minds, at www.reasononline.com, October 2002.
401. Michel Foucault, quoted in a humourously written trashing of Derrida and postmodernism by Steven Plaut, "The Deconstruction of Jacques Derrida," Front Page Magazine, 11 October 2004.
402. Jacques Derrida, in Macksey and Donato, eds, Structuralist Controversy, 267, my emphasis.
403. Goldblatt, "Dangerous Thinkers," 2.
404. John Caputo, Deconstruction in a Nutshell (New York: Fordham University Press, 1997), 176.
405. Stanton Evans, The Theme Is Freedom: Religion, Politics, and the American Tradition (Washington, dc: Regnery, 1994), 49, notes that while Mussolini was imprisoned in 1943, Hitler sent him an inscribed twenty-four-volume set of Nietzsche's works.
406. Peter Shaw, "The Politics of Deconstruction," in The War against the Intellect (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1989), 59. This chapter of Shaw's text offers a general overview of the theme.
407. Peter Shaw, "The Rise and Fall of Deconstruction," Commentary, December 1991.
408. For these quotations and a thorough review of the whole disturbing trend, see Mark Lilla, "The Politics of Jacques Derrida," The New York Review of Books, 25 June 1998, my emphasis.
409. John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997);
410. Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida (New York: Fordham University Press, 1997). These two books deal extensively with Derrida's "Turn" and with the entire underlying theology of deconstruction. Caputo writes as an insider and admirer of Derrida's lifelong deconstructionist "passion" and, in doing so, reveals its great weaknesses.
411. Caputo, Deconstruction, 128, my emphasis.
412. John Millbank, as paraphrased in David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite (Grand Rapids, mi: Eerdmans, 2003), 36, my emphasis.
413. Readers may be interested in Inge Birgitte Siegumfeldt, "Bloom, Derrida, and the Kabbalah," Orbis Litterarum 49 (1994): 307-14. It is not a very clear article but covers relevant ground.
414. Quoted in Caputo, Prayers and Tears, 2.
415. A difficult but useful book for those who wish to follow the theological turn of deconstruction is Hent de Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999); these remarks about "protocols of vigilance" and the like are at pages 429-30.
416. Jacques Derrida, quoted in Caputo, Prayers and Tears, 288.
417. A lucid and seminal treatment of the different emphases and tensions of the Hebrew and Greek worldviews, as seen in Western literary tradition and exemplified by the Bible and the Odyssey, is Eric Auerbach, "Odysseus' Scar," in Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard Trask (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953).
418. This essay has had iconic status among literature students and those who enjoy the history of ideas. It is the orthodox view on the differences between the Greek and Hebraic worldviews of ancient times. In his excellent study Thorleif Boman, Hebrew Thought Compared with Greek (New York: Norton, 1970), 23.
419. Caputo, Prayers and Tears, 334-5, my emphasis.
420. Two articles on the Internet are instructive in this respect. See "Derrida: Latest Jewish Prophet and Alephtavian Midrashist," at http://home. nycap.rr.com/porush;
421. also a brief summary of this argument, "Name of G-d," at www.arts.uwa.edu.au/MotsPluriels/MP1901dpName.html.
422. Susan Handelman, quoted in Caputo, Prayers and Tears, 232.
423. Jacques Derrida, quoted in Caputo, Deconstruction, 131.
424. Derrida, quoted in Caputo, Prayers and Tears, 131, original emphasis.
425. Stephen Plaut, "The Deconstruction of Jacques Derrida," www.Front-PageMagazine.com, 11 October 2004.
426. Caputo, Deconstruction, 132, original emphasis.
427. Mark Goldblatt, "Dangerous Thinkers: 20th Century Philosophers' Love Affair with Totalitarianism," a review of Mark Lilla's The Reckless Minds, at www.reasononline.com, October 2002, my emphasis.
428. Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad (New york: Norton, 2003), 17.
429. Caputo, Deconstruction, 174.
430. See especially the series of publications on public ignorance in modern democracies in Critical Review 18, nos 1-3 (Winter-Summer 2006)
431. Which begins with a discussion of the enduring validity of the first and most famous critique of public ignorance in democratic systems, namely Philip E. Converse's "The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics," originally published in David E. Apter, ed., Ideology and Its Discontents (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1964), and republished in this edition of Critical Review at pages 1-74.
432. Caputo, Deconstruction, 121.
433. Hart, Beauty of the Infinite, 424.
434. Raymond Tallis, Not Saussure (London: Macmillan, 1988), 226.
435. Steven Pinker, Words and Rules (New York: Harper Collins, 2000), 239.
436. Martin Joos, Readings in Linguistics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), 96, my emphasis
437. cited as an example of linguistic and cultural relativism in Donald Burquest et al., Language Universals: Research Papers of the Texas SIL (Dallas, tx: Summer Institute of Linguistics, 1982), 2.
438. Joseph Greenberg, ed., Universals of Language (Cambridge, ma: mit Press, 1963).
439. Burquest et al., Language Universals, 2, my emphasis.
440. Greenberg, ed., Universals of Language, xv, my emphasis.
441. John E. Joseph, Nigel Love, and Talbot J. Taylor, "Jakobson and Structuralism," in Landmarks in Linguistic Thought II (London: Routledge, 2001), 18. My section on Jakobson relies heavily on this excellent chapter.
442. See Roman Jakobson and Morris Halle, Fundamentals of Language (1956; reprint, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1971), 38.
443. Joseph, Love, and Taylor, "Jakobson and Structuralism," 27.
444. Jakobson and Halle, Fundamentals of Language.
445. See Joseph H. Greenberg, Charles A. Ferguson, and Edith A. Moravcsik, Universals of Human Language, vol. 2, Phonology (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1978).
446. Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language (New York: Harper Collins, 1994), 158.
447. This and the prior two universal statements are from Charles Hockett, "Phonological Universals," sec. 5 of "The Problem of Universals in Language," in Greenberg, ed., Universals of Language, 24ff.
448. Neil Smith, Chomsky: Ideas and Ideals (Cambridge, uk: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 78.
449. Pinker, Language Instinct, 267.
450. See these and other points in Jennifer Ganger and Karen Stromswold, "Innateness, Evolution, and Genetics of Language," in Human Biology, April 1998.
451. The comments here are drawn from William Croft, Typology and Universals (1990; reprint, Cambridge, uk: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 4.
452. Smith, Chomsky, 101. This is by far the clearest explanation of the Chomskyan revolution in language theory.
453. Joseph, Love, and Taylor, Landmarks, 132-7.
454. Croft, Typology and Universals, 4.
455. See http://ling.uni-konstanz.de:591/Universals/Introduction.html.
456. Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), 71-2, original emphasis.
457. Noam Chomsky, Syntactic Structures (1957; reprint, The Hague: Mouton, 1965)
458. was actually a distillation of a much longer prior book, Logical Structures of Linguistic Theory (New York: Plenum Press, 1955, 1975).
459. Pinker, Language Instinct, ch. 8, "The Tower of Babel."
460. Adriana Belletti and Luigi Rizzi, "Editors' Introduction: Some Concepts and Issues in Linguistic Theory," in Noam Chomsky, On Nature and Language (Cambridge, uk: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 1.
461. Chomsky, Syntactic Structures, 13.
462. Smith, Chomsky, 41.
463. Geoffrey Sampson, The Language Instinct Debate (London: Continuum, 2005), 14.
464. Smith, Chomsky, 27.
465. Aristotle, "The Poetics," in Charles Kaplan, ed., Criticism: The Major Statements (New York: St Martin's Press, 1975), 30.
466. For the Literary Universals Project, see www.litup.unipa.it/docs/index.htm.
467. Patrick Colm Hogan, "Literary Universals," in Poetics Today 18, no. 2 (Summer 1997): 223-49.
468. Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1949), xvi.
469. Hans Beidermann, Dictionary of Symbolism: Cultural Icons and the Meanings behind Them, trans. James Hulbert (New York: Facts on File, 1992), vii.
470. James G. Frazer, The Golden Bough (London: Macmillan, 1890).
471. Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968).
472. Misia Landau, Narratives of Human Evolution, quoted in Jonathan Wells, Icons of Evolution (Washington, dc: Regnery, 2000), 222.
473. Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return, trans. W.R. Trask (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1954);
474. Mircea Eliade, Myth and Reality, trans. W.R. Trask (New York: Harper and Row, 1963);
475. Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols (New York: Dell, 1964).
476. For definitions, qualifications, and references for most of the items, readers are encouraged to see his book Human Universals (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1991).
477. Stephen Freeland, "Evaluating Biological Constants and Standards at the Root of Life," a paper presented at the conference Fitness of the Cosmos for Life: Biochemistry and Fine Tuning, Harvard University, Cambridge, ma, 11-12 October 2003, 3.
478. From Patrick Nolan and Gerhard Lenski, Human Societies (New York: McGraw Hill, 1999), 12.
479. E.O. Wilson, On Human Nature (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1978).
480. John Alcock, The Triumph of Sociobiology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 76.
481. John Morgan Allman, Evolving Brains (New York: Scientific American Library, 2000), 152.
482. Wilson, On Human Nature, 67.
483. The list is adapted from David Buss, Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind (New York: Pearson Education, 2004), chs 3-9.
484. Doreen Kimura, Sex and Cognition (Cambridge, ma: mit Press, 2000), 184.
485. See Wilson, On Human Nature, 130-2;
486. Doreen Kimura, "How Males and Females Become Different," ch. 4 in Sex and Cognition, 17-29.
487. For a summary of the differences, see Anne Moir and David Jessel, Brain Sex: The Real Difference between Men and Women (London: Mandarin, 1991), ch. 1.
488. Kimura, Sex and Cognition, 177.
489. See Robert L. Nadeau, S/He Brain (Westport, ct: Praeger, 1996), 58.
490. See Eleanor Maccoby and Carol Jacklin, "Power Relationships," ch. 7 in The Psychology of Sex Differences (Stanford, ca: Stanford University Press, 1974), 227-74.
491. See Nadeau, S/He Brain, 50.
492. See James Q. Wilson and Richard Herrnstein, "Gender," ch. 4 in Crime and Human Nature (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985), 104-25.
493. See also Glenn Wilson, "Aggression and Crime," ch. 7 in The Great Sex Divide: A Study of Male-Female Differences (Washington: Scott-Townsend, 1992) 115-31.
494. See Wilson and Herrnstein, Crime and Human Nature, 121;
495. Wilson, Great Sex Divide, 123.
496. See Kimura, Sex and Cognition, 62.
497. See Wilson, Great Sex Divide, 100.
498. Kimura, Sex and Cognition, 122.
499. See Nadeau, S/He Brain, 56.
500. Kimura, Sex and Cognition, 31.
501. Wilson, Great Sex Divide, 54.
502. Kimura, Sex and Cognition, 81-9.
503. Wilson, Great Sex Divide, 100.
504. Kimura, Sex and Cognition, 95.
505. Wilson, Great Sex Divide, 35.
506. Kimura, Sex and Cognition, 127-8.
507. See Wilson, Great Sex Divide, 102.
508. This list of ethical/moral universals, by no means exhaustive, is found in Richard H. Beis, "Some Contributions of Anthropology to Ethics," The Thomist 27, no. 2 (April 1964): 174-223.
509. Marc Hauser, Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong (New York: Harper Collins, 2006).
510. "The Bookshelf Talks With Marc Hauser," an interview of Marc Hauser by the managing editor of American Scientist Online (July 2006), www.Americanscientist. org/template/InterviewTypeDetail/assetid/52880.
511. From Jay Budziszewski, Written on the Heart: The Case for Natural Law (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1997), 120.
512. From C.S. Lewis, "Appendix: Illustrations of the Tao," in The Abolition of Man (Glasgow: Collins, 1978), 49-59.
513. Drawn and summarized from Joseph H. Greenberg, "Some Universals of Grammar with Particular Reference to the Order of Meaningful Elements," in Joseph H. Greenberg, ed., Universals of Language (London: mit Press, 1963), 110-13.
514. This and the prior two universal statements are just two of a number described by Charles Hockett, sec. 5, "Phonological Universals," in "The Problem of Universals in Language," in Greenberg, ed., Universals of Language, 1-28.