The previous instalment of this blog  (No. 77) showed how serious the collapse of philosophy has been… how a formerly much valued, challenging element in rational thinking has gone AWOL.  Frank Furedi wrote a book which asked this question: <<Where have all the PHILOSOPHERs gone?>>

The intellectual subset of the human race seems to have tacitly acknowledged that this disappearance of credible philosophy has happened.  Whether we can “live with this gaping hole in our wide-ranging common discourse” is another question. (We need a common system of coherence to keep the wheels of politics, industry and economy turning.) The advanced world seems to be slipping —by small slips— into an overall state of incoherence.  It is a kind of incoherence which will inevitably lead to social breakdown, muddle, relationship breakdown, mental collapse, pain, violence and even extinction… unless we take a determined stand against the trend. 

Everything is shouting at us —loud and clear— <<We need a new, fully credible, feet-on-the-ground, working philosophy!>>.

For nearly 300 years Rene Descartes has been regarded as the “Father of Modern Philosophy”.  If he were alive today, what would he make of today’s sad capitulation into incoherence?

What quasi-Cartesian tools could we start to use to bring back positivity, hope and civilised standards?

Descartes’ great discovery was coordinate geometry. It worked a treat and was adopted by Issac Newton as the special methodology he needed to develop his calculus, kinematics and theory of gravity.

Descartes also hit the philosophical Bull’s Eye with his Cogito Argument… it  tried to set limits to the amount of doubt which could result from the “disconcerting new thinking” which was confounding everyone at the end of the 17^th century. His conclusion was clear-cut:  there was a limit to the extent that open-ended doubt might demoralise us… it was that we all had minds, which no amount of doubt could suffocate.  The one thing we couldn’t doubt was that we were doubting (=thinking) creatures.       

So the first implication of neo-Cartesian thinking must be today that schools should not be organised by “ideological managers” whose most striking original common motif was that they didn’t believe in the existence of minds!  (It beggars belief that they were put in charge of the UK “education system” in the 1980s.) This kind of stimulus-response psychology is, in effect, totalitarian.  Children can’t be “educated” by trying to bully them into memorising things… things which are promptly forgotten once they have served their purpose (to game the exam).  Genuine “education” is a pillar of rich, warm, mental and moral strength which lasts for a lifetime.

The second implication of neo-Cartesian thinking must be to find a new way of extending the modelling power of maths.  According to Plato the test for “reality” is whether something has a granitelike permanence. Maths is not of course timeless, because although its symbols are static, they only become “part of maths” when someone is creatively, actively, exploring their possibilities. This activity can only happen via a passage of time. But how much of our modern experience of reality is tied to granitelike phenomena? Obviously, relatively little. Bishop Butler famously remarked that probability is all around us. Yes, there is a huge tsunami of randomness which underlies our daily lives.

Probability might sound like this “new way of extending the modelling power of maths” but it does it by (1) seriously weakening the conclusions of an analysis, and (2) offering no hint of verification, because a wide range of outcomes are possible, each with its own probability.

We need a new randomness-based modelling kit which can give rise to meaningful but transient stable conclusions.  It is Anti-Maths, which is the study of transient objects which arise from a jumping random substratum and typically enjoy a stable, but transient life.

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CHRISTOPHER ORMELL around 1^st March 2026chrisormell@aol.com