Sublime

Past philosophers have taken this observation and run with it, arguing that minds and brains are fundamentally distinct and separate phenomena. This is the view the philosopher Gilbert Ryle called “the dogma of the Ghost in the Machine.”1 But modern scientists and philosophers who have rejected dualism haven’t necessarily replaced it with a better

But even when the fog is pointed out, we’re no better at navigating through it.

The universally lauded Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate is a full-frontal assault on the implicit idea that biology plays virtually no role in social issues and norms. Nicholas Wade, at the time a New York Times science writer, wrote A Troublesome Inheritance about “Genes, Race and Human History.”

On some other world, possibly it is different. Better. There are clear good and evil alternatives. Not these obscure admixtures, these blends, with no proper tool by which to untangle the components.

These women, whose essential distinction of motherhood was the dominant note of their whole culture, were strikingly deficient in what we call "femininity."