I have been doing some very depressing reading in the last little while. Like a good little librarian, when Nana got sick I ran straight to the stacks to do research on Nursing Homes, since that is exactly where Papa is going to end up now that Nana can't take care of him. Let me share some gems of wisdom with you.
1. The name "Nursing Home" is not the correct nomenclature. Care Facility, please.
2. Alzheimers is both tragically sad and hysterically funny. Really, how can you not laugh when your grandfather puts his pants on backwards like KrisKros?
3. Any family member who gives a damn will feel like a murdering ungrateful son of a bitch for even thinking of letting their loved on set foot in the door of a care home. The only ones spared this miasma of guilt are those assholes who don't care anyhow, which strangely makes them the only people who are really able to make objective decisions.
4. There are two types of books on Nursing Homes. First, there are the kind that actually give you good information on the different types of homes, making the transitions, assuaging your overwhelming guilt, etc. These books tend to be written by medical professionals or researchers. They are often helpful.

Then there are the books that average-joe authors wrote to assuage their guilt for putting their own parents/grandparents in crappy awful nursing homes. These books vacillate unpredictably between telling you that your parent will be just fine, and giving you examples of the horrific treatment their own loved one suffered at the hands of the demonic care aides before gasping out "how could you?" with their dying breath. These books are not helpful.

Sadly, there is no way of knowing which type of book you have got your hands on before you jump onto the rollercoaster ride of either medical detail or heartrending stories of someone else's crappy experience. I would like to send a general notice out to all authors of books on care facilities: IF YOU DON"T HAVE A SOLUTION TO THE PROBLEM DONT TELL ME ABOUT IT!!! If my grandfather might be restrained upside down from a chair in the ceiling so that the psycho head spinning care aides can watch him better, and YOU KNOW A WAY TO PREVENT THIS, then by all means, include problem and solution in your book. If you don't have a fucking clue how to prevent said tragic problem, DONT" TELL ME ABOUT IT because it will just make me freak out, and want to send my grandfather to the SPCA instead of the BC health care system.

Ok, i'm quite sorry. That was quite a rant there, please forgive. Signing off,
Guilt-ravaged-moderately-coping-granddaughter.

Not so Ivory After All

I've been reading this book slowly since I went to a session about it at the PSA (Philosophy of Science Association) meeting in November. I went to the session, in part because someone I knew was speaking there, and in part because I actually do have a professional interest in the subject matter (shameless plug goes here), even though it's not what I primarily work on. But after the session, I really really wanted to read the book.

But first some background about what it's actually about. Despite the title, it has almost nothing to do with logic, and everything to do with how the Cold War climate in the US managed to eliminate the social and political side of academic philosophy of science. The cover picture is from the Second International Conference for the Unity of Science, in Copenhagen, 1936. (I know this, because the back cover says so. Don't be too impressed.) Pictured are several prominent philosophers of science, like the wonderful Otto Neurath, who is largely the subject of my co-authored paper, and scientists, like Niels Bohr (front right), as in the Bohr model of the atom you learn in highschool physics class.

The Unity of Science movement was associated with a group of philosophers of science, most of whom had training in at least one scientific discipline such as physics, mathematics, logic, or in Neurath's case, economics, called the Vienna Circle, who have been much misrepresented. Several members of the Vienna Circle were instrumental to a project known as the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, one of whose principal goals was to foster communication and cooperation among scientists of different nations and across different scientific disciplines. The project was conceived with an awareness of the social value of science,
and of the role that science and technology could play in shaping society. The political background informing these projects was largely left-wing; but this caused many of them a great deal of trouble when they immigrated to North America during the war.

And that's the story Reisch tells in the book: how the anti-communist fervor and McCarthyism of the Cold War climate managed to eliminate this social and political aspect from philosophy of science. Several members of the Vienna Circle were investigated by J. Edgar Hoover under suspicion of being communist collaborators, due to their European political backgrounds, and left-wing sympathies. The internationalism built in to the encyclopedia project was viewed as dangerously "red". Left-wing supporters of the unity of science movement were professionally attacked and then marginalised. Unity of science was seen as a totalitarian communist movement - not something to which an academic would want to be linked (if he wanted to keep his job, that is).

But what makes this even more interesting is how timely the book is now, given the current (anti)intellectual climate of the US, as a cautionary tale about how we don't want things ending up again. I really don't think academia is such an ivory tower as it's made out to be in the first place, but it's fascinating to see the political pressure at work trying to force it to be that kind of isolated institution.

This is an excellent book, and a good reminder to those of us in academia to take a lesson from the unity of science movement, that academia does not have to be that isolated institution. And that given that we're lucky enough to have a lot of academic freedoms which these philosophers of science did not have in the 40's and 50's, to be socially responsible about what we do with it.