In Essence

Louis Menand, in The New Republic (Feb. 26, 1990), 1220 19th St. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036.

Ask any long-time reader of the New
Yorker which articles he likes best and there is a good chance that he will delight- edly confess (whether it is true or not) that he does not read the thing, he just looks at the cartoons.
That, says Menand, a professor of Eng- lish at Queens College, is typical of the New Yorker style itself: self-effacing and unpretentious on the surface, sometimes a bit snob...

culture. Kojeve, Alexandre Koyrh, and Eric Weil, three superior intel-
But Rorty rejects the radi- lects "against whom I did not dare measure myself." Kojeve, cal social and political con- the most brilliant and most mysterious, gave a famous semi- clusions-a wholesale re-nar on Hegel's Phenomenology with a group of auditors that jection of the liberal, included Raymond Queneau, Jacques Lacan, Maurice bourgeois order-that the Merleau-Ponty, and occasionally Aron. His esoteric interpre-...

two 18th-century thinkers, the Earl of Shaftesbury and Lord Kames: Moral and religious sentiments are not the product of associations that need to be analyzed; they come directly from ex- perience.
That perspective, says Wilson, is one of the things that gave Wordsworth's poetry its beauty. But it was beauty and philoso- phy both that revived the young John Stu-

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

art Mill and inspired him to reconcile "associationism" with Wordsworth's "ir-reducibility." In t...

a panel of experts vested with the authority to establish uniform testing standards-if they find the tech- nique to be valid.
"The Tragedy of Needless Pain" Ronald Melzack, in Scien-Morphine 's Merits tific American (Feb. 1990), 415 Madison Ave., New York, N.Y.
The young soldier who becomes addicted to drugs because he received morphine for war wounds is a stock character in popu- lar mythology. But his like is seldom found in real life, says Melzack, a psychologist at McGill University.
For...