Occam’s Razor advises us never to multiply entities beyond what’s needed to explain what needs explaining. Is this because the simpler explanation is more likely to be the correct one? If so, what would explain that? So no. Rather it’s… Read More ›
Wittgenstein
UNWOKE U
Jonathan Haidt has argued that a university can seek truth, or it can pursue justice, but not both. He’s right about the dichotomy, but I’m not sure he’s best identified the two choices. Getting the truth is far above anyone’s… 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 ›
“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 ›
The Myth of Civilian Immunity — Why There ‘Could’ Be No Such Law —
Abstract. Busting the myth of civilian immunity has long since been standard, albeit unpalatable, philosophical fare. But such myth-busting has invariably appealed to either a) Hobbes’ argument for the incoherence of the very idea of international law, or else b)… Read More ›
WHAT IS A CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY?
In this paper I attempt to rescue the notion of a crime against humanity from the charge that it is either redundant or else a pseudo-concept. I argue that crimes against humanity are gross violations of basic human rights when… Read More ›
THE ONTOLOGY OF PEOPLES AND THEIR DECOLONISATION
Once upon a time there were peoples living in North America who were as different from one another as were the peoples living in Europe from one another at the same time. As in Europe, these peoples spoke different languages,… Read More ›
LEAVE IT BE
I think there might be some tension in my position. ‘Tension’ is the term professionalized philosophers have been trained to use in place of the less charitable terms ‘inconsistency’ or ‘contradiction’. Okay, I think I might have inadvertently saddled myself… Read More ›
Paulosophical Vimplications 