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musingsonwomenshealth.com

Reflections on 40 years as a doctor in Women's Health

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  • Fake lies?

    Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about truth, but not for the reasons you might expect. Not because of the abundance of ‘fake news’ about which we seem to be constantly reminded, and not necessarily because I’ve been occasionally embarrassed in a lie, nor because of the tangled web you wove when first you practiced…

    gozzter

    January 6, 2021
    Uncategorized
    Albert Camus, assertions, authorial authority, boundary markers, David Hume, deception, edges, Emar Maier, ethics, Fake news, fiction, George Orwell, H.P. Grice, imagination, imaginative resistance, lies, literary fiction, literature, Plato, reportage, Sir Philip Sidney, speech acts, the paradox of fiction, trespassing, Truth, University of Groningen
  • Counterfactualities?

    Remember Plato’s Cave allegory? In his Republic he describes a scenario in which some people have spent their lives chained in a cave so they can only see the wall in front of them. There is a fire behind them that casts shadows on the wall that they have no way of knowing are only…

    gozzter

    December 30, 2020
    Uncategorized
    Arthur Schopenhauer, counterfactuals, depression, depressive realism, depressogenic thoughts, Joseph Forgas, Julie Reshe, Martin Heidegger, Plato’s Cave Allegory, psychotherapy, Sigmund Freud, University of Tyumen in Siberia
  • Imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown

    The poet’s eye, in fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name. Such tricks hath strong imagination.           …

    gozzter

    December 23, 2020
    Uncategorized
    art, biosemantics, cave art, Columbia College, counterfactuals, imagination, language, Mark Johnson, metaphor, poetry, Richard III, Shakespeare, Stephen T Asma, task grammar, University of Oregon
  • Does the love of heaven make one heavenly?

    Why do find myself so attracted to articles about religion? I am not an adherent -religion does not stick to me- nor am I tempted to take the famous wager of the 17th century philosopher, Pascal: dare to live life as if God exists, because you’ve got nothing to lose if He doesn’t, and everything…

    gozzter

    December 16, 2020
    Uncategorized
    Alain de Botton, BBC Future, Catholicism, Charon, Christianity, Constantine, Edict of Milan, Edict of Thessalonica, God, Hinduism, Karl Marx, Linda Woodhead, Pascal’s Wager, polytheism, religion, Sigmund Freud, Sumit Paul-Choudhury, the River Styx, Theodosius, University of Lancaster, Voltaire
  • Is the thing translated still the thing?

    When I was a student at University, translated Japanese Haiku poetry was all the rage; it seemed to capture the Zeitgeist of the generation to which I had been assigned. I was swept along with others by the simple nature images, but -much like the sonnet, I suppose- I failed to realize how highly structured…

    gozzter

    December 9, 2020
    Uncategorized
    Alison Anderson, Haiku, literature, Mark Polizzotti, metaphrase, Muriel Barbery, paraphrase, poetry, Rilke, Rumi, The Elegance of the Hedgehog, translation, translators
  • To hold, as it were, a mirror up to Nature

    Who am I? No, really -where do I stop and something else begins? That’s not really as silly a question as it may first appear. Consider, for example, my need to remember something -an address, say. One method is to internalize it -encode it somehow in my brain, I suppose- but another, no less effective,…

    gozzter

    December 2, 2020
    Uncategorized
    Alan Watts, aphids, bacteria, boundaries, Derek Skillings, growth, identity, individuals, individuation, microbiome, reproduction, Shakespeare, skin, symbiosis, University of Pennsylvania
  • Wast thou o’erlook’d, even in thy birth?

    That Age can do some funny things to the mind seems fairly obvious. The accumulation of years, brings with it a panoply of experience that, hopefully, enables a kind of personalized Weltanschauung to emerge -things begin to sort themselves on the proper shelves, and even if they remain difficult to retrieve, there is a satisfaction…

    gozzter

    November 25, 2020
    Uncategorized
    Age, Alison Stone, birth, David Albert Jones, Kahlil Gibran, Lancaster University (UK), mortality, natality, preconceptual reality, The Soul of the Embryo
  • Virtues we write in water

    I’ve only recently stumbled on the concept of virtue signalling. The words seem self-explanatory enough, but their juxtaposition seems curious. I had always thought of virtue as being, if not invisible, then not openly displayed like chest hair or cleavage. Perhaps it’s my United Church lineage, or the fact that many of my formative years…

    gozzter

    November 18, 2020
    Uncategorized
    Macquarie University in Sydney, Neil Levy, Shakespeare, virtue, virtue signalling
  • Whodunnit?

    Popular opinion to the contrary, it seems to me that there are advantages to cultural naïveté -well, literary innocence, at any rate. Being seduced into a novel or short story solely because of the reputation of the author, or the ravings of a friend, risks disappointment -if only in your friend’s lack of sophistication. And…

    gozzter

    November 11, 2020
    Uncategorized
    anonymity, authors, classic Latin literature, classic literature, cultural naïveté, false news, graffiti, Homer, literature, Nero, Octavia, public media, Roman literature, social media, the Iliad, Tom Geue, University of St. Andrews in Scotland, vox dei, vox populi, writing
  • Fire burn, and cauldron bubble

    I love it when I hear a new word, wrestle with a new concept. Pyrocene -don’t you adore it? Even just sounding it out quietly in your head, it’s  hard to miss the excitement, or the imagery. It takes its shape, as with all great epochs, by combining two Greek words, pur (or pyro), meaning…

    gozzter

    November 4, 2020
    Uncategorized
    Anthropocene, Arizona State University, biotic matrix, climate, Fantasia, fire, Fire Age, fire-animal, Goethe, Holocene, hominids, Paul Ducas, Pleistocene, Pyrocene, Stephen J Pyne, the Sorcerer’s Apprentice
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