Leon Wieseltier offers a great sermon against scientism. The question of the place of science in knowledge, and in society, and in life, is not a scientific question. Science confers no special authority, it confers no authority at all, for the attempt to answer a nonscientific question. It is not for science to say whether …
Tag Archives: humanities
Links: On Aaron Swartz, Nate Silver, Detroit, Grace in Teaching, A New Cancer Technology, Etc
Not sure if I will keep doing these links…perhaps will do them less frequently and with less annotation, since even this takes a surprising amount of time. Harry Lewis on MIT’s response to Aaron Swartz, contrasting it with Harvard’s response to the cheating scandal. Note the importance of moral wisdom in universities. (And note how …
Math, Writing, and the World: The Freshman Writing Course I’m Teaching in the Fall
(There’s a printer- and footnote-friendly pdf version—with links still working!—here if you prefer.) This fall, I’m teaching a freshman writing course at the University of Michigan.1 I’ll be writing a lot about this course and related topics over the coming months, so I thought I’d take a moment to introduce the course and talk about …
Links: Number Theory, Mel Brooks, Garden Hermits, Gay Marriage, Passwords, etc
I promise to have some real posts soon—an announcement describing my freshman writing course about math, and a two-part series on the late economist Albert Hirschman, including a discussion of how his theories apply to the tech world—but for now a few links: There’s big news in math with Yitang Zhang’s proof of a big …
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