Ophelia Benson is co-author (with Jeremy Stangroom) of The Dictionary of Fashionable Nonsense: A Guide for Edgy People[1], Why Truth Matters[2] , and Does God Hate Women?.[3]
Benson is the editor of the website Butterflies and Wheels and Deputy Editor of The Philosophers' Magazine. She also writes a monthly column for the online version of the magazine,[4] and also wrote under the pen name "Kassandra".[5]
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Benson was born in New Jersey and attended university in the USA before working in a variety of jobs, including being a zookeeper for several years,[6] before becoming an author.
Her books and website deal with the necessity of defending objective and scientific truth against the threats to rational thinking allegedly posed by religious fundamentalism, pseudoscience, wishful thinking, postmodernism, relativism and "the tendency of the political Left to subjugate the rational assessment of truth-claims to the demands of a variety of pre-existing political and moral frameworks".[7]
Benson's book Why Truth Matters examines the "spurious claims made for creationism, Holocaust denial, misinterpretation of evolutionary biology, identity history, science as mere social construct, and other 'paradigms' that prop up the habit of shaping our findings according to what we want to find".[2]