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(This piece was published in the Times Literary Supplement April 17th 2015) Many philosophers, both theists and atheists, bemoan the low standard of the contemporary debate on the tenability or otherwise of religion. Richard Dawkins and his allies focus on the crudest, most literalistic forms of religion, which are then all too easily dismissed as self-evident idiocy.…

The wealthy used to be scared of democracy. Inequality is now at such obscene levels that it ought not to be possible for anything other than a party of radical redistribution to get elected. But the wealthy have discovered a way around this. If you give people the wrong information, then you can persuade them…

Three negative and a positive reason to vote Labour: 1. The Tories have not specified 10 billion of proposed welfare cuts because they are going to be nasty (one proposal they’ve looked at is removing all carers’ allowances). There’s a good chance there will not be much a of welfare state left in five years’…

In a political context being serious about education isn’t assumed to be the same thing as giving teachers a pay rise. Being serious about health isn’t taken to be the same thing as making doctors’ lives easier. And yet in Britain and the US ‘being serious about the economy’ has become synonymous with doing things…

I have talked a lot about the ‘Russell-Eddington’ solution to the mind-body problem, proposed by Russell and Eddington independently in 1927, but quickly forgotten about because it didn’t fit the physicalist zeitgeist of the mid to late 20th century. The view is currently enjoying a revival, and is in my view one of the most…

Following recent HSBC tax evasion scandal, I reprint here an article I wrote for Tax Justice Focus in 2012. Re-conceiving Class War In 2011 we witnessed two extraordinary international people’s movements: the Arab Spring and the Occupy movement. The Occupy movement followed the Arab Spring, and seemed to draw inspiration from it, to feel a…

Here is my presentation from Daniel Dennett’s Greenland consciousness cruise, in which I argue that we need to return to the Russell/Eddington approach to the mind-body problem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUH-YZODuT8 Here is a letter I had in Guardian this week on the same topic: A way forward to solve the hard problem of consciousness I participated in…

I’m taking a break from this blog for a bit to ensure I finish my book ‘Consciousness and Fundamental Reality’ by Christmas. I’m almost there, and am putting up a chapter a week on my website as a way of forcing myself to get it done: http://www.philipgoffphilosophy.com/publications.html So far up I’ve put up chapters 1-5…

[In response to Cameron’s speech yesterday, I have re-posted an argument I put on my blog 12 months ago. Obviously he didn’t see it the first time]. Many political arguments start from the assumption that taxation is the government taking ‘our money’ off us. When austerity hit the arts in 2011, Dr Steve Davies of…

Richard Dawkins has recently claimed that a woman pregnant with a foetus with Down’s syndrome is morally obliged to have an abortion. Set aside for one moment whether or not he is right about this; and indeed whether or not he is right that God does not exist, or that religion is a form of…