PFRR POSTS
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 […]
01/06/2020
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 […]
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. […]
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 […]