PFRR POSTS

THOUGHT: The World has recently descended into a fragile state.  ‘The World’ here means the human world, the procedures, institutions, methods, customs, civilities etc. which allow seven billion of us to “get along together”, after a fashion, on this planet...


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02/01/2023

Philosophy for Renewing Reason – 39

Today morale in most local communities is probably at an all-time low. We have been wallowing in gloom since the conjunction of Covid 19, the dreadful 2022 Ukraine War, the poor level of post-Brexit leadership, and the severe austerity caused by outbreaks of strikes and inflation. To a degree, Christmas […]
01/12/2022

Philosophy for Renewing Reason – 38

Remembrance Sunday was held this year in Whitehall on November 13th and the ceremony was staged…with the usual spectacular turnout of the British Royal Family and the UK/Commonwealth establishment.  The presence of WW1 veterans has virtually ceased, but the haunting music which rings out while wreaths are placed on the […]
01/11/2022

Philosophy for Renewing Reason – 37

An Interim Report has recently been published by Baroness Casey on the state of the Metropolitan Police’s response to misconduct within the force. It says that numbers of Met officers are being sacked for misconduct every year, but also that these numbers are not enough: there are, apparently hundreds of […]
01/10/2022

Philosophy for Renewing Reason – 36

Queen Elizabeth II’s sudden death has brought home to many of us the role she played in balancing the persistent anti-social, nihilistic aspects of modernity.  Which raises the question <<Why did such a persistent vein of anti-social emphases come to be so up-front and prevalent?>>. Well, for about a hundred […]
01/09/2022

Philosophy for Renewing Reason – 35

Anti-mathematics is the new, the 100% abstract, 100% logical, 100% lucid way… to describe transient reality.  And there are transient realities all around us, quite different from —actually much commoner than— the allegedly timeless realities onto which so much attention has, historically, been paid. How did it come about that […]
31/07/2022

Philosophy for Renewing Reason – 34

The theme of the author’s six essays in The New English Review (NER) on-line journal has been the De-mystification of Mathematics, a project which Ludwig Wittengstein tried to accomplish, but on which he was unable to make much progress. Now two posts have appeared in The New English Review respectively […]
30/06/2022

Philosophy for Renewing Reason – 33

How can we alert the alertable few of today’s young people that reason and light in human affairs will disappear unless we take a determined stand to support it and bring it back? Whether we like it or not, the global human community is hurtling towards a contentious, chaotic, painful […]
31/05/2022

Philosophy for Renewing Reason – 32

How can philosophy gain any significant traction in a post-modern world? It all depends on what we mean by ‘philosophy’. Many philosophers nowadays argue that the problems of philosophy have no solution. In which case they are better classified as ‘pseudo problems’ —conceptual muddles which look at first like genuine […]
02/05/2022

Philosophy for Renewing Reason – 31

Renewal through Philosophy No. 31 – The Coming Post-Mathematic Age Dramatic recent developments in actimatics were summarised in Blog. No. 30 and they call, by their presence, for a commentary on what it all means.   Simultaneously my fifth essay in the online New English Review (May 2022) will serve to […]
01/04/2022

Philosophy for Renewing Reason – 30

A catch-up on recent progress in Actimatics Since the concept of ACTIMATICS was introduced into these philosophy-renewal blogs two years ago, there has been some quiet progress in developing the new 100% abstract discipline. This instalment offers an outline account of the current situation. In many ways Actimatics might just […]
02/01/2024

Philosophy for Renewing Reason – 52

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 […]
01/12/2023

Philosophy for Renewing Reason – 51

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 […]
02/11/2023

Philosophy for Renewing Reason – 50

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 […]
02/10/2023

Philosophy for Renewing Reason – 49

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 […]