Is philosophy as an academic subject still relevant to life in the third decade of the 21st century?  This is a question which hangs in the air wherever the academic subject is being pursued today in colleges and universities. It appears that today a daunting level of intellectual confidence is […]

This blog switches from the grand philosophic issues derived from anti-mathematics, to a specific problematic feature of Wittgenstein’s conception of the nature of philosophy.  A paper in the current issue of the  journal Philosophy took the line that Wittgenstein’s concept of philosophy was essentially therapeutic. Various commentators have taken this […]

In the last blog (no 52) I pointed out that rigorous ethics is needed to hold civilisation together, and also that piecemeal science cannot provide a basis for rigorous ethics, because it can only offer us a “not yet falsified” view of the nature of the world and human nature.  […]

Today there are signs of a widespread fatalistic mood about the collapse of Western Civilised Ethics. It is fuelled by an educational vacuum, i.e. a lapse in the edifying effect of schools, and the casual,  inadequate level of judgment brought by the mass population to politics. A US former president […]

One of the most difficult problems associated with the aim of renewing reason in education —and hence with issues for the P E R Group— is how to harmonise the mindstyle of the humanities with the mindstyle of the STEM subjects. Craig Ross did an impressive presentation about this to […]

The horrific War started by Hamas against Israel is another sign of how lack of clear thinking in today’s world builds-up, creates hatred, and leads to violence. For ‘clear thinking’ read ‘fair reasoning’. The trouble is that the dreadfully-myopic so-called ‘thinking’ which characterised the 20th century —assisted by the 21st […]

There is one massive reason why the most general kinds of thinking cultivated by the human race are in disarray. It is that most individuals with the greatest potential curiosity about the general outlook for humanity have been deliberately shying away from thinking about such universal matters for a very […]

Why is philosophy labouring in the doldrums in academia and coming over as a sketchy diversified patchwork in the few places where it is still alive outside academia? Why has intellectual confidence fallen onto the floor? Why is the outlook for humankind so unremittingly bleak? Whatever has gone so hopelessly […]

The P E R Group was first muted in 1993, at a philosophical conference at UEA in Norwich.  Its emergence can be interpreted in various ways.  It grew from a small group of people who had at that time been rooting for more than 20 years for a major reform […]

We have now passed the date in June in 1993 when the P E R Group was first muted, at a philosophical conference at UEA in Norwich.  It was desperately needed because a group of substandard theorists had taken over school systems all over the world and education had —in […]