PFRR POSTS
01/11/2022
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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 […]
28/02/2022
The attenuated state of today’s philosophy It is a strange fact that today homo sapiens is passing through a very difficult, dangerous multi-sided existential crisis, while, at the same time, philosophy —homo sapiens’ historic way of probing deeply into conceptual territory to get a broad handle on things— is in […]
01/02/2022
The specialisation obsession in philosophy sits oddly in a world desperately needing generalised vision We are now struggling with two existential crises (The Pandemic and Global Heating) which have probably arisen, in the last analysis, from our neglect of thinking “in the large”. This has arisen from an extraordinary mass […]
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. […]