So-called “political correctness” (PC) is an oxymoron: it posits a metric, the implication being that there is an objective standard being referred to, which of course is being rejected in the first instance by PC’s inherent relativism. Radical social constructionism in its attempt to reject essentialism (race, gender, nationality, class, and so on) through the…
(Note: references are incomplete). Plato’s simile of light – the images of the Sun, the Divided Line and the Cave are outlined in the Republic at the close of Book VI and at the beginning of Book VII. The simile of light has attracted a vast literature from Nettleship’s Victorian lectures, down through the work…
I This well-worn question needs to be re-analyzed into the following three subsidiary questions. First, for what reasons did the government (i.e. the organs of state, broadly speaking, the emperor, the senate, officials, and provincial governors) persecute? Secondly, for what reasons did ordinary pagans (i.e. the general populace) demand persecution? Thirdly, we need to examine…
It’s been ten years since a snappy and provocative paper by Andy Clark and David Chalmers (1998) audaciously burst upon the philosophical scene. Given that the paper had been rejected three years earlier by three major journals (Chalmers 2008, 42), it must surely have come as an enormous surprise to the authors that a veritable…
A co-authored paper with Chris Onof, Faculty of Engineering, Imperial College London and School of Philosophy, Birkbeck College London. A pre-press version is available for download here. Final to appear in Cognitive Systems Research Special Issue. Abstract: To know is to cognize, to cognize is to be a culturally bounded, rationality-bounded and environmentally located agent. Knowledge and cognition…
[Note: There are some formatting issues that still need to be attended to] Polybius believes that the historian’s task is to identify the causes of past events, making these events intelligible and therefore functional to an educative (practical and moral) purpose. This conception of historical activity has to a great degree informed historical thinking ever…
[There are still some formatting and character issues to be resolved in the following text] That the question which is the subject of this discussion was posed at all, primarily reflects the concerns of the modern and only secondarily those of Thucydides. The possibility of a ‘scientific’ history while certainly suggestive in Thucydides is very much a…
I have had the great priviledge to be associated with the Sabre Foundation. If, like me, you are of the view that access to education must surely be a key to ameliorating all aspects of life, then check out their website. For each $100 donated to Sabre, Sabre can ship up to $3,000 worth of…
An appreciation of David Wiggins’ Sameness and Substance (there is some notation later in this piece that needs to be rectified – some characters were lost in the copy and paste) —————————————————- The social constructionist argument takes the generic form of: 1. x need not have existed, or need be at all as it is.…
Some thoughts on Larry Shapiro’s excellent The Mind Incarnate . Shapiro identifies two related Cartesian Materialism ghosts. The first is the multiple realizability thesis (MRT); the second is what Shapiro terms the “separability thesis”. MRT is the generic idea being that the mind is only contingently dependent on the brain, the a priori implication being…
manwithoutqualities 