Category: Uncategorized

I am extremely busy at the moment, finishing my book and giving talks in UK, but I just wanted to write something short in support of the UK remaining in the EU. My view is that the essential problem of our age is a crisis of sovereignty: Although in many countries (imperfect) democracy has been…

Imagine you’re having coffee with your best friend; for the sake of discussion let’s call her ‘Basil’. According to common sense, the whole of Basil is present with you in the coffee shop. (If you’re facing her then you probably can’t see the back of her head; but it, and the rest of her, are…

The demand for freedom is a powerful rallying call. The economic right often portrays its relentless demand for ever lower taxes as a fight for freedom from ‘big government’. One problem with this framing is that money is itself a kind of freedom; financial freedom is freedom to have and to do. The poor have…

  Yesterday Professor Hanoch Ben-Yami and I debated Wittgenstein’s famous ‘Private Language Argument’. In this argument Wittgenstein tries to refute the idea that there are inner experiences which have no logical connection to behaviour, by arguing that we could not refer to such ‘private entities’ in language or thought. If this argument is sound, my…

In connection to my post last month, here is the William James (19th Century philosopher, psychologist, and brother of Henry James) in his great study of religious experience ‘The Varieties of Religious Experience’, categorising drunkenness as an important kind of mystical experience. I knew I had an excuse! “The sway of alcohol over mankind is…

Most people these days understand the meaning of the word “God” as follows: God is a supernatural being who knows everything, can do anything, and is perfectly good. We can call belief in “God” according to this definition “classical theism.” I want to propose a quite different way of defining “God”, as follows: God is…

Modern society doesn’t emphasise enough how hard it is think freely. In the 60s many thought they had thrown off the shackles of socially constructed ways of thinking about the world, and finally unleashed free and unprejudiced thought. The sad thing was that the clothes, the language, the music, and the lifestyle quickly became a…

I spend half my professional life arguing against one of the most popular views in philosophy – a view known as physicalism – and the other half defending one of the most ridiculed, namely panpsychism. This is not a great strategy for winning friends and having influence, and indeed when I was struggling to find…

In his column in the Guardian this week, George Monbiot reaches conclusions strikingly similar to those I reached in my recent blog post. Because of this, and because reactions to my last post wildly misinterpreted what I was trying to say, I thought I’d try to give a shorter and clearer summary of my claim.…

People aren’t angels. Nor are they perfectly rational. This is of course completely obvious, but the left often behaves as though you only need to get out the facts about the bad things that are happening and people will immediately respond in the morally appropriate way, at least through the ballot box if not at…