219. CULTURAL COLLAPSE - What Happens When We Lose All Context?
Read More“We are adrift and discombobulated. Deeply so. “
203. IN THE DARK - Medicine, Epistemology and Economics
Read More“I wonder if the economics of medicine are too-often overlooked, even in countries with a decent free public healthcare system. I wonder how many people have lived or died because of investigations presenting as questions of epistemology - how can we possibly know what is going on in this body? - which are actually questions of finance - can we justify the expenditure it would take to find out?“
199. DOES SANTA EXIST? - A Christmas Inquiry
Read More“I pointed out that while their ‘evidence’ certainly seemed to point to the idea that none of them were being given gifts from Santa - at least not on the Christmases in question - it did not completely remove the possibility that Santa Claus might still exist…“
191. WRESTLING WITH DONALD TRUMP - Why We Ignore The Wrestling Connection at Our Peril
Read More"Trump is undoubtedly a monster. Trump is a massive threat to the kind of democracy that all Americans should hold dear. But he is using the playbook of professional wrestling to win the White House once again and is therefore a monster we are responsible for keeping alive so long as we continue to not take the influence of professional wrestling on politics seriously."
174. THE TRAITORS AND EPISTEMOLOGY - Why We're All Floundering In The Dark About Knowledge
Read More“It is epistemically wild to watch how fellow human beings construct seemingly viable theories of knowledge out of the flimsiest of observations and inferences.“
161. THE GREAT CONSPIRACY - On Philosophy Classes and Dangerous Thought
Read More“conspiracy thinking - the initial pathway that leads to conspiracy answers - trades on many of the motivating assumptions of philosophy as an activity: a desire to get to some underlying hidden truth beyond the superficial understanding of everyday life.“
160. EPISTEMIC INEQUALITY - Why Should We Care About Inequalities in Knowledge?
Read More“This week I’m doing something a little different on Philosophy Unleashed and releasing a lecture I gave last week to Year 12 students at a Sixth Form interdisciplinary conference on the theme of inequality…“
145. IT'S NICE TO HAVE OPTIONS - Existentialism and UCAS.
Read More“Deciding not to bore the student with Donald Rumsfeld’s treatise on known knowns and known unknowns, I instead decided to offer guidance from the existentialists. That is to say: no real guidance at all. What my student was facing, I suggested, was a living example of the sort of anxiety and despair existentialist philosophers suggested comes from our absolute freedom.“
142. THE INEVITABILITY OF FANTASY - Leaning Into Storytelling In Lieu of Truth
Read More“The more depressed you are the more accurately you see the world.“
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 More132. BLACK HISTORY WITHOUT TEETH - On The Potential Epistemic Deficit of Black History Month
Read More“we need to first address with students core concepts like structural racism, white supremacy and white supremacist thinking, historical constructivism, critical race theory, colonialism, ideology, education policy and curriculum design. Without that, it will be very hard for the students we teach to place any of what they learn during Black History Month into a meaningful, long-term schema of knowledge.“
116. 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.“
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…“
66. IF A POST FALLS IN THE WOODS - When Is A Post Not A Post?
Read More“And yet this post exists…”
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.”
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.”