blackshama's commentary on Philippine issues

Sometimes I spend good money on philosophy books. This is a lasting legacy of I having taught at Ateneo de Manila! If the Catholic Knight puts the sword on the "tyranny of relativism", theoretical physicist, Alan Sokal skewers the relativists in his latest tome, "Beyond the Hoax: Science,Philosophy and Culture" Sokal made history in 1996 when he sent a paper entitled "Transgressing the boundaries:Towards a transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity" to a respected journal "Social Text". The paper passed review and got published. The problem is the paper was a spoof of gobbledygook proportions. Sokal wanted to expose the silliness of the academic Left and the social constructivists which he believed would be best served if their intellectual underpinnings had a dose of reason. In the so called science wars, the realist Sokal took to battle, postmodernists. Nonetheless, I find Sokal's chapter on "Cognitive Relativism in the Philosophy ...

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a 27 km long particle accelerator that straddles France and Switzerland just concluded its first test run. Nine thousand physicists were awaiting the result and then the champagne corks popped! The collider aims to replicate the few moments after the Big Bang. The scientists aim to find the Higgs Boson a.k.a. the "God particle". All these particle physics is gobbledygook to me, an ecologist, but this is what Wikipedia says about it "is a hypothetical massive scalar elementary particle predicted to exist by the Standard Model of particle physics ; it is the only Standard Model particle not yet observed. Experimental observation would elucidate how otherwise massless elementary particles nevertheless manage to construct mass in matter. More specifically, the Higgs boson would explain the difference between the massless photon and the relatively massive W and Z bosons . Elementary particle masses, and the differences between electromagn...

Browsing through Powerbooks' sale, I found a copy of "Quarens, Searching, Paghahanap" edited by Jovino G Miroy and Ma Liza Ruth A Ocampo. Reading through the first pages, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that there exist Pinoy medievalists! They have an organization called Philippinarum Studii Medioevalis Societas . I once thought that medieval studies are pursued mostly in European universities and a dwindling number of American ones that have classics departments. In the Philippines, I know not of any classics department in any college or university. Anyway, I had my first brush with the classics when I was reading for the doctorate in marine biology in Australia. You may ask "Why read classics when doing a quintessentially modern science like marine biology" I have to answer that my dissertation was on systematics and biogeography and many of the original marine species descriptions of molluscs were in Latin. I had to learn Latin! Fortunately, there was a ...

Galileo is the first modern experimental scientist. There is no one alive that can probably match him. One of the stylists for the modern Italian essay, he is one of the first writers in Italy to write in Italian not in Latin as was the practice among the learned. His decision to write science in the vernacular attracted condesension from the philosophers and the theologians. (Much earlier two famous Italians, Dante and Saint Francis of Assisi, wrote the founding works of Italian literature, the Divina Commedia and the Canticle of the Sun thereby establishing that Italian was capable of expressing the highest human ideals ). Galileo intellectualized Italian and spread scientific ideas wider by writing in that language. Galileo established that a vernacular can reasonably express Science. Galileo was no atheist. Unlike what the atheist Richard Dawkins had to endure, Galileo had to face the worst kind of peer review then available (The Holy Office with threats of rack and torture). In a ...

As the secular University of the Philippines celebrates its 100th year in 2008, Pope Benedict XVI's speech that he was supposed to deliver at Rome's La Sapienza Universitylast January 17 gives us some food for thought. EWTN has the full English text of the speech originally in Italian. I have always admired and have been amazed at Benedict's way of discourse. The former Don of Regensburg does not fall into stereotyping and logical twists unlike the Don of Oxford Richard Dawkins! That's why I await the day when the Oxford Don meets with the Infallible Regensburg Don! Bui I digress here are some highlights of the speech. " Well, so far I have only talked about the university in the Middle Ages, trying however to show to what extent its nature and purpose have remained the same all along. In modern times knowledge has become more multi-faceted, especially in the two broad fields that now prevail in universities. First of all, there are the natural sciences which have ...