What, Why & How do we Know ?
Hat tip to Anita Leirfall – who, we discovered quite randomly, lived just a few doors away from where Sylvia and I lived in Oslo – quite randomly posting a link to a 2021 edition of BBC Radio 4 “In Our Time” on Kant. Kant’s Copernican Revolution | In Our Time Melvyn Bragg and guests … Continue reading “The Eyes in Kant’s Head”
I gave a presentation to Teesside Skeptics in the Pub on 15 December 22 Diana had asked us a question – on the Facebook Group Page in November 22 – about “whether we identified as scientific sceptics, and what that meant to us?” Back in August 22 Humanists UK had asked us to say if … Continue reading “#GoodFences – Is Scientific Skepticism Enough?”
This is a 2023 Annotation of a 2005 paper prepared originally for the Liverpool Conference on Robert Pirsig and his Metaphysics of Quality (MoQ). The text is unchanged except for correcting a few obvious typos and formatting errors, and to keep me honest the original “It’s Evolutionary Psychology Stupid” remains here complete with old broken … Continue reading “Zero to Pirsig”
[Currently still in Draft] A bit of pre-amble since I expect this post may attract a few new visitors. An “event” happened Sept / Oct 2021. Something killed-off a large number of crustaceans off the Tees Mouth coast, maybe even more widely. Whatever killed them off it has had a consequential effect on livelihoods of … Continue reading “The Beach Debacle”
I saw the excellent Dave Snowden speaking at the Annual Mike Jackson lecture at Hull University yesterday evening. [Post Note: The recording now available here.] [Post Note: This post is the start of a conversation in that continues here and again here, in 2024] Excellent in every way – Dave’s presentation and his conversation with … Continue reading “Dave Snowden and Mike Jackson”
A thread starter: One recurring theme of mine is stuff that looks like conspiracy to conspiracy theorists – the coast guy, anyone – is a symptom of having no model or accepted language to account for a felt problem. With the received wisdom of western, objective (scientific) rationality in the dominant culture – feelings don’t … Continue reading “Received Wisdom”
I mentioned Salman Rushdie’s latest “Victory City” a couple of times. First impressions here, and again once I’d got into reading it here. I noted in that last post that there were already lots of real-life philosophical applications and that the clever narrative tricks in the trajectory of the 250 year first-person story were providing … Continue reading “Everything I want is in my words.”
I hold David Deutsch to be one of the smartest thinkers I know. Deutsch over Rovelli and Carroll “Experience the thrill of the highest level of discourse available on the planet.” Certainly his two books – “The Fabric of Reality” and “The Beginning of Infinity” made huge and permanent impressions. Also his constructor theory – … Continue reading “Deutsch Optimism”