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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 the pseudo-think-tank the Institute of Economic Affairs argued on Channel Four news that the 20% cuts to the arts didn’t go far enough: art funding should be…

In this month’s issue of ‘Philosophy Now’ there are three letters giving intriguing responses my article ‘The Zombie Threat to a Science of Mind’ in last month’s issue (reprinted on this blog). Below I offer some short counter-responses. Dave Magnall from Wilmslow Cheshire. Dave argues that the flaw with the zombie argument is that it…

I was born in the winter of discontent, which swept Maggie to power and began a thirty year consensus that deregulated markets know best. I was politicised by the crash, which so conclusively discredited that view of the world. 2008 should have marked the end of free marketism, just as 1989 marked the end of…

I’m an analytic metaphysician who thinks analytic metaphysicians don’t think enough about consciousness. By consciousness I mean the property of being a thing such that there’s something that it’s like to be that thing; the property of having an inner life. There’s something that it’s like for a rabbit to be cold, or to be…

(Published in May/June edition of ‘Philosophy Now’) For the last five hundred years or so, physics has been doing extraordinarily well. More and more of our world has been captured in its explanatory net, from the formation of planets and stars, to the nature of space and time, to the very basic constituents of matter…

George Osborne says he’s dealing with tax avoidance. He is and he isn’t. It all depends what you mean by ‘tax avoidance’. As Richard Brooks demonstrates in his excellent book ‘The Great Tax Robbery’, the government has made some moves to clamp down on ‘tax avoidance’, but only understood on the very narrow definition according…

British Society for the Philosophy of Science Workshop ‘Consciousness and Structural Realism’ All welcome! Time: Monday April 29th, 10:00-18:00 Location: The Arts Library, School of the Arts, 19 Abercromby Square (1st floor), University of Liverpool Contact: philip.goff@liv.ac.uk Timetable 10:00-10:30 Philip Goff (University of Liverpool): ‘Can we Live with Austerity? – Setting up the issues’ 10:30-11:30 Eleanor…

Imagine you are standing at a cross roads being offered the ‘free choice’ of taking the road on the left or the road on the right. The only problem is that the information you have been given to inform your choice is completely wrong. You have been told that the road on the right will…

A couple of weeks ago I attended what I believe to be the world’s first conference specifically on ‘phenomenal concepts’. It took place in Rio. It was an awful lot of fun, and extremely intellectually stimulating. It occurred to me in the airport post-conference (after a chat with Derek Ball) that there was an interesting…

An important book came out this year. The volume ‘Cognitive Phenomenology’, edited by Tim Bayne and Michelle Montague, collects articles for and against the thesis that thought is a kind of conscious experience. This debate is both deeply strange and deeply important. It is deeply strange as it is an argument over the very general…