139. A CHRISTMAS CAROL ONE YEAR ON - A Philosophy
It's a Christmas Carol one year later, and Ebeneezer Scrooge is doing a bit of philosophy which might undo his transformation…
Read More116. NOTHING IS REAL AND YET EVERYTHING IS REAL - On Constructing A Better Reality
Read More“Consider: it cannot both be true that advertising has no influence on our thinking and that people spend over £23bn a year on advertising. At worst, people are spending their twenty three billion pounds to influence us in a range of ways we are barely aware of. At best, the only advertising that has ever worked is the advertising for advertising itself which has convinced so many people to spend billions on a product which is utterly useless. Which means advertising does still work.“
106. WHAT WE HAVE HERE IS - On Our Failure To Communicate
Read More“Often we hear people say something that they didn’t think they said at all. They might accuse us of not listening, or being ignorant of certain things, but the fact remains that if you say X and I hear Y, then you did not communicate X to me, you communicated - whether intentionally or not - Y.“
98. INTERPRETING THE RESULTS - What Do Votes Ever Really Tell Us?
Read More“the arguments for democracy are independent from the mechanics of voting and, too frequently, true, authentic, democracy is impeded by those unfit mechanics, not aided by it“
89. THE EPISTEMIC INJUSTICE OF COVID 19 - Checking For Symptoms In The Dark
Read More“Miranda Fricker wrote of what she called “epistemic injustice” - “a wrong done to someone specifically in their capacity as a knower”. She identified two forms of such injustice: “testimonial injustice”, the injustice of denying credibility to someone’s word, and “hermeneutical injustice”, the injustice of disadvantaging someone in their access to interpretive resources and forming an obstacle to their capacity to know. This week a member of Sage, the UK government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, urged the UK to expand its official list of Covid symptoms so that UK citizens could better identify if they have the virus. In this article I intend to show that by ignoring this advice, and keeping the official list of symptoms restricted to a high fever, a new continuous cough, or a loss of sense of smell or taste, the UK government is permitting a continuing epistemic injustice to occur which is causing unnecessary and highly preventable suffering.“
86. I'VE TOLD YOU BEFORE - On the Potential Deception of Knowledge Transfer
Read More“If the relationship of knower to supposed transferee is asymmetrical and hierarchical, abuses can happen.“
82. IS ALL REALITY VIRTUAL? - Reflecting On My Lack Of Concern About VR
Read More“there are many philosophical anti-realists who accept the non-existence or possible non-existence of widely believed concepts or experiences and yet advocate living as if they are real nevertheless, for a wide range of reasons.“
69. WHAT, IF ANYTHING, HAVE I LEARNT FROM HAVING COVID 19? - Reflections on Getting the Plague
Read More“now it is three weeks since the day I got my positive COVID test, and I cautiously think I may have survived it, I have decided to look back at the experience to see what, if any, philosophical lessons it taught me.“
67. DISPATCHES FROM THE CAVE - Why Being "Realistic" Demands The Impossible
Read More“The pandemic has shown just how flimsy “the way things are” actually are. From basic norms of social interaction to entire economic systems, COVID-19 has unwittingly acted as the liberating hand breaking the chains of Plato’s epistemological prisoner and dragging them out of the cave and into the light…This isn’t, however, a post about the coronavirus…“
63. THE VALUE OF PATIENCE - Responses to Waiting
Read More“It has been a week of waiting.“
62. THE HORROR - Is It Rational To Enjoy Scaring Ourselves?
Read More“as I curl up with another scary story and find myself predictably sleepless later on, trembling at familiar creaks made new, and far more sinister, by the unsettling images now in my head, I wonder: with horror so real and ever-possible why do we indulge in the self-harm of scaring ourselves intentionally, at Halloween or any other time?“
60. THE TONE OF OUR OPPRESSION - Truth and Authority Under Trump
Read More“The Trump virus found the ultimate weaknesses in organised human life: 1) we have such shaky foundations at the best of times for what constitutes as real “knowledge” that if you repeat an untruth enough times, from enough “sources”, it can seem just as “true” as any legitimate truth; and 2) that the notion of external authority on which our political systems are based is entirely illusory. As any criminal can tell you: that there are laws against doing certain things impose no actual limitation on doing that which is against the law. Criminals, by definition, break laws all the time. And the only differences between those who break laws who we call “criminals” and those who break laws that we don’t, are either that they have been caught or that we don’t really enforce the law.“
46. AN EXPERIMENT IN TIME TRAVEL - In Which A Teacher Attempts To Prove Time Travel Impossible
Read More“Inspired by listening to Olivia Coombes talking about the philosophy of time travel on a recent episode of The Panpsycast philosophy podcast, I was reminded, sadly, that I have already empirically proven the impossibility of time travel several times over in my career as a teacher. Or at least I have attempted to.”
45a. THERE IS NO ARGUMENT FOR RE-OPENING UK SCHOOLS YET - To Warrant Change, Something Significant Needs To Have Changed
Read More“When the stakes are this high (life and death) we need to be able to separate nostalgia and sentiment for what is sensible and what is necessary. “
38. QUESTIONS FOR THE END OF THE WORLD - Some Concerns and Queries As COVID-19 Continues To Spread
Read More“the world has changed. And here are the questions arising to me as it does…”
34. DID I SLEEP OR NOT? - An Insomniac's Epistemological Struggle
Read More“When we are, and when we are not, conscious seems to be a fairly fundamental piece of self-knowledge every human being should have access to. The more I worry about my insomnia, however, the more I realise how little about our own unconsciousness we actually know.”
25. AN ATHEIST THAT FEARS HELL IS STILL AN ATHEIST - A Student Writes on Why He Can Still Be Scared of Something He No Longer Believes In
Read More“As an atheist I have not practiced religion for a few years, however, just because I went from belief in God to a dis-belief in God does not mean that all the religious beliefs I held are overruled straight away, or in a simplistic and straightforward manner. This fear of hell stays with you forever.“
23. THE NOT-SO GREAT DEBATE - On The Need For Intellectual Self-Defence In An Age of Stupid
Read More“There is a truth out there, beneath the soundbites and clickbait. There are actual facts about what our politicians have done and what they are planning to do and it is our duty as citizens, whoever we are voting for, to make sure our vote is as fully informed as is possible. A television debate will never give us that. They are nothing more than a PR stunt. Another stop on the campaign trail. A mechanism for repeating buzzwords and talking points. To treat them as anything more than that is to abdicate our democratic responsibilities and leave ourselves open for manipulation and propaganda.”
20. COULD THE PAST HAVE BEEN DIFFERENT? - A Student Grapples With The Futility of Historical Counterfactuals
Read More“If we cannot change the past itself then why do we concern ourselves with the ‘what ifs’? Perhaps we may want to conceive that the grass would have been greener in the present if the past had been different...”
18. APPEARANCE VS REALITY - A Student Questions How Well We Can Ever Truly "Know" Anybody...and What We Can Do, If Anything, To Protect Ourselves From Getting Hurt.
Read More“Philosophy has long had a tradition of asking questions about the difference of appearance versus reality and today I want to talk about how people appear to you compared to how they really may be inside.”