PFRR POSTS
06/08/2024
We saw in blog 58 that the slow disintegration of our society as an organic whole can probably only be halted by introducing a radical change in state education. State education MUST try to inculcate all its learners into a sense of responsibility to, and membership of, the society. The […]
03/07/2024
The problems of philosophy of politics at the present time are multiple, difficult and diverse. They begin with an historic anomaly: the collapse of all previously credible world-views and universal codes of behaviour. This is a uniquely troubling situation. Such codes were the glue which used to hold society together. […]
03/06/2024
The inexplicable poverty of modern political reflection An unexpected consequence of modernity has been the consistently weak level of insight stemming from political philosophy during the last hundred years. There have been few political philosophers of any stature since Karl Marx: and his reputation, let’s remember, was partly built on […]
01/05/2024
In the last few blogs I have pointed out the astonishingly simplifying effect of anti-maths when applied to scientific modelling. Suddenly a thousand unsatisfactory, hopeless questions disappear. Jumping up and down is in order… This is not just great news —it is the kind of great news we have been […]
02/04/2024
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 […]
01/03/2024
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 […]
01/02/2024
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. […]
02/01/2024
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
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
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 […]
01/08/2025
Sir James Jeans postulated in the 1930s that <<God was a mathematician!>>. A more commonly held view of the same general kind is that <<Physical reality is ultimately mathematical!>>. Among ordinary intelligent people though such comments are now —nearly a hundred years later— less widely heard. But within the physics […]
01/07/2025
‘Philosophy’ is the historic name for the widest mode of seriously practised rational discourse about the nature of the physical world, the meaning of mathematics, the conditions for tolerable social wellbeing, and comfortable relationships between people (ethics). But today all these discourses are wilting badly, even visibly disintegrating, because of […]
02/06/2025
Present the morale of the UK is in a dangerous, parlous place. There is a ranging epidemic of online fraud, the justice system is, in effect, broken, shoplifting is being virtually ignored, and gut faith in the capability of fairminded democratic ruling governance is on the floor. Education, which ought […]
01/05/2025
Philosophy in Academia is currently in a dismal, forlorn state. Its methodology has become narrowly scholastic, and there are virtually no big fascinating ideas which are circulating, or enthusing a “school” of academic ideologues, or at least none which count as ‘philosophy’ by the best historic standards. Some topics which […]