PFRR POSTS
01/09/2021
The last instalment of this blog (August 2021) aired the concept that the world needs a return to intense caring as the everyday basis for civilised society. Today there is a shortfall of intense caring in every sector of human activity, and as a result things are beginning to fall […]
02/08/2021
The world is currently going through a bad patch. The Covid-19 pandemic is still raging on, global warming is producing dangerous weather conditions, there are many places where chronic warfare has reduced the built environment —and any semblance of ‘civilisation’— to rubble, the drought of fresh political ideas continues, and […]
02/07/2021
The last instalment of this blog (June 2021) aired the continuing significance of using mathematical modelling to illuminate the way ahead. It stated the self-evident case for this reason-based way of pathfinding the future, and hence of adding to the commongood. But much of the latest news remains dismal, and […]
02/06/2021
The last instalment of this blog (May 2021) aired two brilliant new insights about the possibilities of modelling which have risen to the surface during the pandemic. To say these developments are “hopeful”, is a considerable understatement. (They are the Peircean Interpretation of Mathematics and Actimatics.) When taken in, and […]
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 […]
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 […]