Denis Dutton Fans Rejoice

— Good stuff from the our man at Arts and Letters Daily. A thoughtful discussion of the role of skeptical doubt occurs in Dutton’s review of Jennifer Michael Hecht’s The Great Doubters and Their Legacy From Socrates and Jesus to Thomas Jefferson and Emily Dickinson. Besides being eminently sensible, Dutton slips in a few good swipes at Freudians and Marxists. This, also: “These days, except for a few aging professors who still teach postmodern literary theory, few skeptics reject the overall validity of science.” Nice.

And then there’s this outstanding, appreciative, but critical, review of Charles Murray’s Human Accomplishment in the New Criterion.