PFRR POSTS
01/12/2021
This is the last Blog for the year 2021 and it raises the question <<How can one convey —within the conventions of measured, serious language— the utmost importance of the conclusions which spring from finding a solution to the hitherto unsolved Central Puzzle of Modern Science?>> This Puzzle is: Whatever […]
01/11/2021
The last blog in this series focused squarely onto the Problem of the Central Puzzle facing modern science, the question which is implicit in the explanatory method of modern science —deconstruction of tiny entities like genes, molecules, atoms, protons… into still tinier entities. The central puzzle is very clear: Whatever […]
01/10/2021
We turn now to look at the Problem of the Central Puzzle facing modern science, because this Central Puzzle is currently being shamelessly ignored by the scientific elite. Science begins as the expression of a kind of intense curiosity about the discovery of unexpected pattern in the world. It is […]
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 […]
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 […]