Today the state of philosophy in the intellectual discussionsphere is in decline in both width and weight… and quite pathetic in quality. Where have the “Big Beasts” of philosophy gone? There seem to be no successors with the reputation, discipline or standing which were achieved by Wittgenstein, Ayer, Popper or Lakatos.  There seems to have been a mysterious snuffing-out of any version of deep, realistic, science-based philosophic insight.  Instead we have a jumped-up new activity called “knowledge engineering”, a strictly technical specialty concerned with converting various categories of early digital and analogue information into new digital modes

This “knowledge engineering” sounds rigorous, useful and effective: it fields qualities which were formerly associated with serious philosophy… hence its dominance.  It has led to things like character recognition, object recognition, facial recognition and AI.  By comparison “philosophy” has become increasingly bitty, woolly, spaced-out, and vague… almost entirely focused onto the remnants of “moral philosophy” —which remain after many carts and horses have pushed their way through Virtue’s broken principles. As a consequence of this decline, the discussionsphere has been all-but “philosophy free” for quite a long time. In 20^thcentury the French President Mitterand was apt to call-in the leading French philosophers to discuss fundamental policy options. This would not happen today. Recognised, academic, philosophy has sunk to a very low level indeed.

The result:  a serious loss of rigour, justice, sense, and security in today’s political, legal and international affairs.  

So let’s go back to basics, and revisit the peculiar problem-field from which philosophy used to spring.

Philosophy stems from the fact that there are various obvious umbrella truths like <<The universe must have begun somehow>> which seem to be inexplicable. What could possibly explain why the universe’s first moment occurred? It appears that something must have been already there to prepare the structures of the seedling universe and trigger its arrival.  In which case, this moment was not the true moment when the universe began!

Some radical theologians admit that the common answer, “God”, is just a way of “handling” this extraordinary mystery.

Sometimes two adjacent umbrella truths clash with each other, as with the umbrella truth that humans have freewill, in spite of another umbrella truth that everything which happens in an individual’s body is a consequence of the operation of biological and bio-chemical iron laws.

Such problems represent the most difficult intellectual challenges we face.

But the verdict of the last 100 years is quite disappointing:  we have, in effect, given up trying to explain these contradictions: we have, in effect, thrown-in the towel of philosophy. [This summarises the motivation behind this series of blogs: it is a project to re-energise reasoning.]

In a word, we have lost the unspoken faith which our predecessors enjoyed… the possession of a capacity to try to understand our condition.

This”thrown-in towel” is pathetic self-defeatism.   Some apparently insoluble problems in maths and science in the 1920s were distinctly and officially “declared out of bounds”.

How could such an abandonment of cognitive hope happen?

Well, the dreadful effect of the killing fields of WW1 was to abolish any slight feeling of optimism..

But now, more than 100 years have passed.

There is no excuse for such a totally defeatist mood today. We are much better equipped to deal with the baffling mysteries of philosophy than the depressive savants of WW1 were in their day. Wittgenstein took the trouble to study and understand the way ordinary words have meaning. Crick and Watson took the trouble to study and understand the genetic mechanism which creates living organisms (DNA). Turing and von Neumann took the trouble to turn dreams about possible powerful computing machines into working, general-purpose gadgets.  Bardeen, Brattain and Shockley took the trouble in the 1960s to make these gadgets extremely reliable, using semi-conductors. Charles Peirce, the 19^th century American philosopher, took the trouble to understand what maths delivered for the human race (the implications of large promising hypotheses. Tragically, his words were overlooked for about six decades. They were finally published as late as 1956.)  Afterwards the automated maths of computers was used by lots of NASA teams to illuminate the implications of such hypotheses. The answers they got told NASA whether these projects were viable. They included planning the trajectories of space probes… which were all done using Newtonian equations: in this way the credibility of Newtonian theory was roundly reclaimed, contrary to the seriously misleading headlines of 1919 which had shouted  <<Newton disproved!>>.  So here are seven good reasons to believe that we now have the conceptual tools at hand… finally to breakdown the awesome problems which proved too hard for the feeble, disillusioned gurus of the 1920s.         

So the gist of the message is that humankind was ambushed around 1900  by two incredibly difficult scientific dilemmas (Michelson-Morley and Russell’s Contradiction), which caught them out in the 1920s, and disillusioned them to the nth degree. But today, a 100+ years later, we have acquired seven new conceptual tools to try again.

And these new tools have done the job! They have led to anti-maths, the natural antidote to an increasingly regimented, oppressive, over-done maths.

Since the beginning of civilisation maths has been used to model the universe.  It has done quite a good job, but the limitations of such “outline modelling” have recently become evident. This has now built-up into a crisis of chronic misunderstanding.

Signs of a new era have arrived!

 Anti-maths modelling promises an understanding of transient reality, as opposed to the rigid, timeless, “wooden” reality studied by maths.  This “transient reality” is of course the emergence of organisms and eventually sentient humanity.

It is a revival of Kant’s brilliant insight that the laws of physics are, in effect, the conditions necessary for us to exist as sentient beings.  A rich future of understanding and cognitive limelight beckons!    

You can send your comment on this website: email your thoughts to per4group@gmail.com. CHRISTOPHER ORMELL around 1^st February 2026  chrisormell@aol.com