Relativism Archive

  • The Pull of Reality

    The Pull of Reality

    Posted on May 26, 2010 | 1 Comment
    Michele Ledda praises Wasted’s demolition of educational myths but argues for a more incisive critique of the politics of change.

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  • A Response to ‘The Delusion of Free Will’

    A Response to ‘The Delusion of Free Will’

    Posted on December 16, 2009 | 1 Comment
    What Mr Broderick says in his article (or rather, allows Madeleine Bunting to say in hers without any cross-examination) is that free will is an illusion, and that humans are collective beings acting in a cosmos — that this justifies spiritual enquiry, and that Hitchens/Dawkins et al. are nasty for attacking 'god' as the vicious god of the Old Testament when 'god' is just a word used to describe the "infinite and transcendent merging of the individualised sense of awareness with the wider dimension".

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  • Quest Love After Love

    Quest Love After Love

    Posted on November 2, 2009 | No Comments
    I would like to illustrate a problem we face as teachers of English and of poetry in particular. It is time to ask a few questions about how British pupils study poetry and what they are expected to know about it at the end of compulsory education. I will argue that, rather than being asked to provide a personal response to a poem, supported by evidence from the text, pupils would benefit from notes and a critical commentary drawing on some of the most insightful interpretations by literary critics and providing all the contextual information necessary to understand the poem.

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  • Strange Fruit

    Strange Fruit

    Posted on June 8, 2009 | 1 Comment
    ‘A poet’s work,’ he answers. ‘To name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep.’ And if rivers of blood flow from the cuts his verses inflict, then they will nourish him. - Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, p97.

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  • The Other Amis

    The Other Amis

    Posted on May 8, 2009 | 1 Comment
    “I see it differently.” Says Ronan Bennet, “Amis's views are symptomatic of a much wider and deeper hostility to Islam and intolerance of otherness”. Ronan Bennet sees it differently. Good for him. Otherness is exactly what Amis his been banging on about in the ‘world-flash’ post 9/11.

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