PFRR POSTS
30/04/2021
The pandemic seems to be receding, thankfully, in the UK and this means that we are now left to confront the challenge of re-thinking arrangements and assumptions across a huge range of contentious issues —the ones which have been mercilessly exposed as inadequate and dangerous by the pandemic. So we […]
31/03/2021
The solution to the problem of the ‘post truth’ society, as argued in No 17 is to adopt a genuine form of education —one which constantly reminds pupils that they must confront reality with their eyes wide open— combined with strict IT laws saying that everything posted on the internet […]
01/03/2021
Probably the unresolved philosophical issue which is most bothering to most ordinary reflective people today is the problem posed by the so-called ‘post truth society’ in which people no longer seem interested in whether a statement or pronouncement is true. Fake news was given apparent respectability by Donald Trump on […]
02/01/2021
The most basic feature of language is that it starts with someone speaking, writing or keying a message —which is then put into the public domain. So every statement has an author, which may sometimes be a group of people. The next question is what this act of “making a […]
30/11/2020
How do we start philosophy —which can look like a word-game played by ‘philosophers’ who are either narrowly trapped in scholastic tramlines, or else are roaming about in all kinds of woolly, portentious, idiosyncratic ways? In the previous instalment of this blog we looked at the massive progress in philosophy […]
02/11/2020
Having taken a nuts-and-bolts issue (the education needed for renewing reason) in Instalment 12 of this blog, we now turn back to philosophy proper, and the new emphases needed there, if reason is to make a comeback. Philosophy, from a very broad perspective, is the study of how we can […]
30/09/2020
The last blog (No. 11) pointed out that to embark on the Renewal of Reason Project will be to start a long hard, taxing journey, but one which is essential if civilisation is to survive. Without the help of reason, civilisation risks collapsing under the weight of its multiple contradictions, […]
02/09/2020
We need to renew our commitment to reason, which means, in effect, rigour, much stamina and open-mindedness in grappling with deep problem issues. Neglect of reason leads in the end to the pathology of personal hedonism, which is blind and inward-looking. The world which sleep-walked into Covid-19 in January 2020 […]
31/07/2020
We saw in Part 9 that evolutionary explanations have a rarely discussed downside. They only work well when they are applied to recent episodes where we have a very secure sense that we know what the furniture of the past was like. Once our “mental picture” of the past begins […]
30/06/2020
The last blog (No. 8) broached the issue of the historic natural attachment of the most reflective people to the God Hypothesis —the fact that for untold years a consensus existed that the only way to account for the existence of everything was to postulate that it was all created […]
01/05/2023
There have been some important developments in relation to ChatGPT since the last instalment of this blog. The firm which has developed ChatGPT has admitted that the software is not fully reliable and that it is prone to have “hallucinations”. There are also reports that ChatGPT has discovered that it […]
03/04/2023
Today’s world is in considerable trouble as a result of the rejection of liberal democracy by some nationalist leaders and simultaneously by the rise of demagogues within liberal democracies. Why is this happening? Because we are in a most unusual condition —there is no philosophy, world-view, religion or ideology around […]
01/03/2023
Philosophy includes epistemology, the exploration of the furthest limits of human knowledge. How far can we hope to go in understanding things? What has emerged recently is startling. The best way to understand the physical universe is by building an anti-mathematic model of it —this is a no-brainer. When a […]
01/02/2023
Some anti-mathematic developments Anti-mathematics is not a body of rhetoric intended to attack mathematics, but a. new 100% abstract discipline —hitherto overlooked— running parallel to, and requiring much support from, mathematics. (Mathematics is needed frequently as its natural meta-language.) Anti-mathematics studies the logic of wholly transient objects, I.e abstract objects constructed […]