I’ve already blogged about this, but to repeat: Universities in the West are in the process of moving past their best before date. Why? Because 1) the economics of university education has changed, both in terms of a) what information… Read More ›
Social and Political Philosophy
THE CASE AGAINST – OR AT LEAST THE BANALITY OF – EQUAL RIGHTS FOR ALL
No one thinks we should all get the same stuff. A bed is a piece of stuff, but there isn’t room enough for us all to sleep in the same bed. Okay, so it’s that some people think we should… Read More ›
REDUCTION
No one can accuse me of being fair. But were I to be, then yes, every discipline has its own vocabulary, its own syntax, its own rules of inference … Words, phrases, sentences, they all take their meaning from the… Read More ›
PROHIBITED INDUCTIONS
The empiricist holds that all knowledge comes from experience. Whether that’s true or not, it’s clearly false of any useful knowledge. Assuming I can trust in my own perceptions and the reports of others, I know that every day, up… Read More ›
THE VAUGHN SHOOTING
The other day, in the Toronto Ontario suburb of Vaughn, a 73 year-old man, who’d been at odds with his condo board for over a year, decided he’d had enough and went on a shooting spree against his nemeses. The… Read More ›
“YES, BUT WHERE ARE YOU REALLY FROM?”
Ludwig Wittgenstein, arguably the most insightful philosopher of the 20th Century, made the following seemingly paradoxical (but now considered banal) observation. Pretty much everything makes sense until we try to make sense of it. So we’d have been just fine… Read More ›
IN DEFENCE OF THE MISUNDERSTOOD SOCIOPATH
Thought experiment: There’s a very clever man-eating lion on the prowl, so clever that we might just as well accept that it will never be caught. We can take some precautions to minimise the likelihood that our child will be… Read More ›
“PHILOSOPHY, POLITICS, AND LAW” AT THE UNIVERSITY OF LETHBRIDGE
My hypocrisy abounds. How so? Because I can no more define wokeism than the woke can define racism or indigenisation or decolonisation or any of the myriad indefinables that make up their vocabulary. What I can do, however, is ostend…. Read More ›
AND ODDER BY THE DAY
As far back as July 20th, I blogged about the oddity of this war in Ukraine. Since then it’s been proving odder by the day. How so? Well … Putin is telling the Russian people that the West is waging… Read More ›
NATURAL KINDS
Every more than once in a while I get to teach a course in whatever I happen to be thinking about. And so I get to con those students foolish enough to take the course into helping me think about… Read More ›
Paulosophical Vimplications 