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 […]

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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

There are signs that the worst of the pandemic may be over, but the economic damage it has already done is huge.  Putting the economy back together again will require a more positive, more rational, imaginative mindstyle… than anything we have seen in recent times. Much wider, more creative, more […]

SOME GOOD NEWS Extra thinking time made possible by the Covid Lockdown has led to a major breakthrough in Actimatics, the new quasi-mathematical discipline introduced in these Blogs. Actimatic modelling allows us for the first time to aspire to conceptualising a dynamic model of the universe including human consciousness.  The […]

STOP PRESS The coronavirus has changed personal perceptions dramatically. Nothing looks the same today as it did three months ago. It has made almost everyone aware of the inherent fragility of the present World Order… in health terms, in employment terms, in economic terms and, for those most dangerously affected, […]

FUTURE SHOCK: Isn’t this new picture of the universe one gigantic, fanciful, unnecessary thought upheaval? No, it is a large upheaval, but it is neither “fanciful” nor “unnecessary”. There have been many necessary “gigantic thought upheavals” in human history. As when the Greeks discovered that the Earth was spherical, not […]

THOUGHT: Part 3 led to a surprising conclusion, namely that the ultimate constituents of physical reality must be absolutely random. If their behaviour still possessed vestiges of pattern, they would cry out for further scientific explanation. If so, they would not count as the “ultimate constituents” of physical reality. There […]