tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34030248671359520182011-07-07T22:28:57.608-07:00Don't pretend you're not as much a philosopher as the nerd in the next armchair, so here's some serious stuff with a bit of frivolity thrown in. Have a read, then tell me how it is by using the Reactions boxes at the bottom of each post - true, false or just plain bollox!TFBnoreply@blogger.comBlogger181100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3403024867135952018.post-38565097370740748272011-04-12T21:13:00.001-07:002011-04-12T21:18:08.035-07:00

Most of my time now taken up with blogging over here http://essentialthinking.wordpress.com Phil

TFBnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3403024867135952018.post-58305654530621908762010-02-15T06:00:00.001-08:002010-02-15T06:01:32.609-08:00

One of the hardest things to believe is what year it is. 2010 A.D? Are you sure? Not in Thailand, where the year is currently 2553 B.E If you live in an Islamic country, we are now in the year 1431 A.H Chinese ‘New Year’, which just passed on Saturday Feb 13th, means it is probably the year 4707, counting from the first year of the Yellow Emperor’s Reign, but according to some official

TFBnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3403024867135952018.post-60956799864097458252009-12-23T01:19:00.000-08:002009-12-23T07:30:32.649-08:00

"My advice, as a Christian priest, is to shoplift," says Father Tim Jones of the Anglican Church, providing a seasonal spiritual boon to the half-incher worrying about his heavenly credit risk. Not of course, that tea-leafin' is a good thing, says the Father, but if you're faced with starvation, better that you knock off Tesco's than Granny Smith in Tesco's carpark (see the Guardian news story

TFBnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3403024867135952018.post-33249182710356075622009-12-07T01:35:00.000-08:002009-12-07T03:41:42.965-08:00

Tiger’s not perfect, he tells us, but that’s hardly the point. While I have no feelings and no opinion on his life (or sport), I do detest the ‘I’m sorry, I’m not perfect’ excuse for moral failings. Nobody’s perfect, but not everybody lies and cheats. Going by his speech, Tiger Woods seems more concerned with the effect his behaviour had on others rather than on himself. That is to

TFBnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3403024867135952018.post-32004290211800218292009-12-01T08:06:00.000-08:002009-12-01T08:12:45.309-08:00

...or not. Well, we had 'climategate' (poor old Nixon, he'll never be rid of this), now the boffs tell us the hole in the Ozone layer is actually helping to keep the climate cool and drat and blast, banning them CFCs might just close up that hole and increase the rate of global warming. It's a shame, it seems to me, that a perfectly sensible body of scientific data is becoming increasingly

TFBnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3403024867135952018.post-14023797487668056292009-12-01T07:38:00.001-08:002009-12-01T07:40:26.931-08:00

I was reading an interesting thesis the other day on why shareholders need good control mechanisms over managers, to quote “if managers’ compensation is tied to short-term profit, they will be pressured to evaluate projects based on their immediate impact on profit rather than according to the present value of cash flows over the life of the investment. This may motivate managers to turn down

TFBnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3403024867135952018.post-47863250844983611842009-11-28T23:42:00.000-08:002009-11-29T00:25:16.265-08:00

The Guardian recently ran an interesting article on ‘Freenet’ – you can read it here. Freenet claims to provide a secure way for trusted partners to communicate online, swap files and generally stay off the radar. Burmese rebels, Tibetan dissidents, Thai ex-prime ministers, along with unlikely bedfellows such as the ALF and the National Front - basically anyone who wants to communicate

TFBnoreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3403024867135952018.post-88252421884947521722009-10-28T08:35:00.000-07:002009-10-28T08:37:43.269-07:00

Is God an atheist? By "God", lets understand a being with the sort of qualities traditionally ascribed to him by orthodox Christian interpretations; namely, all knowing, all powerful, all present, all that kind of stuff. On the standard Christian definition, there is nothing that God doesn’t know. God does not need to question where he came from or whether a higher or greater power caused his

TFBnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3403024867135952018.post-34895818629683679992009-10-23T23:42:00.000-07:002009-10-23T23:42:52.944-07:00

Should they or shouldn’t they have done it? That’s the question revolving around the BBC’s decision to let right-wing hate-mongerer Nick Griffin get pilloried on Question Time this week. Peter Hain’s no-doubt well-intentioned objections are, unfortunately, hypocritical and unjustifiable, just as Thatcher’s banning of Gerry Adams’ voice in the 1980s was. If you want to live in a free and fair

TFBnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3403024867135952018.post-2059818188779489232009-10-23T09:00:00.000-07:002009-10-23T09:00:38.884-07:00

Space, to quote Bill Bryson’s ‘A Short History of Nearly Everything’, is enormous. Average distance between one sun and another? 30 million million klicks. Looks like the chances of our universe being populated with other life forms is slim, right? Wrong. According to Francis Drake, the maths actually works the other way around. Take a single galaxy, estimate the total number of stars in that

TFBnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3403024867135952018.post-60821299949148182242009-10-21T08:27:00.000-07:002009-12-01T08:19:27.841-08:00

Not surprisingly, the whole ‘Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus’ plot is a load of old cobblers according to real psychologists. Quack psychobabbler John Gray was the first to hit the big time with this kind of book, but his was quickly followed by a whole bunch of copycats, the best known runner up being ‘Why Men Don’t Listen and Women Can’t Read Maps’, but the real psychologists (the ones

TFBnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3403024867135952018.post-76586281190058458642009-10-18T22:40:00.000-07:002009-10-22T08:16:41.592-07:00

Oh, how the philosophers love to argue about this one. It all started with Socrates (see Plato’s works ‘Protagoras’, ‘Meno’ and ‘The Republic’ in particular). Much later in the West, the humanistic turn of the enlightenment needed to find an alternative to the idea that being moral was following divine commandments. Two competing theories captured attention: Kantianism and Utilitariansim. The ‘

TFBnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3403024867135952018.post-6097761305303571802009-10-18T06:23:00.000-07:002009-10-18T06:54:01.287-07:00

Some years ago, Leon Gast produced a movie called ‘When We Were Kings’. The movie tells, in a documentary fashion that is, neverthelss, full of emotional drama – the story of the title fight for the World Heavyweight Boxing Championship held in Zaire in 1974. The fight is between Muhammed Ali, in his thirties and past his prime, and George Foreman – young, fearless and devastatingly powerful.

TFBnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3403024867135952018.post-21795625392498530672009-10-18T04:48:00.000-07:002009-10-18T05:43:03.766-07:00

It doesn't take much more than a scan through the morning papers to see that almost everything going on these days is a global problem. Here's a list in no particular orderi. global warmingii. terrorismii. oil shortagesiii. food & water shortagesiv. migration & immigrationv. hard drugsvi. the economyvii. Problems i to vi are inter-related and co-dependent for a solution.The kind of real changes

TFBnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3403024867135952018.post-2809347628353562192009-10-18T02:22:00.000-07:002009-11-29T00:06:29.053-08:00

What is a person? Apparently, having a mind is neither necessary nor sufficient. New-borns don’t have minds yet, but they are entitled to the same rights of protection under the law as other people. Higher primates also appear to have minds (see ‘Monkeys with Money’), but don’t get the same rights as human babies. According to Peter Strawson, ('Individuals' 1956), 'person' is a logical category

TFBnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3403024867135952018.post-79382544380582226752009-10-18T02:11:00.000-07:002009-10-18T04:24:13.318-07:00

Strangely, philosophers have often wondered whether anyone other than themselves have a mind. Luckily, they’ve all concluded that they're not alone. The trouble comes in trying to justify the grounds on which this conclusion is based. Cognitive experience (‘having a mind’) can only be had from the privileged position of within one’s own mind. Belief that others have it too is an inference based

TFBnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3403024867135952018.post-16734524636486309892009-10-18T00:53:00.000-07:002009-10-21T19:38:56.355-07:00

God’s marketing departments run a number of competing promotional campaigns. It’s really beyond the philosopher’s logical brain to understand how this can do anything but harm the credibility of the product. Surely, if God exists, he would a. have no need of a marketing department; and b. would not allow them to promote an inconsistent message that’s only going to hurt sales. (Incidentally,

TFBnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3403024867135952018.post-77783182334748311012009-10-18T00:34:00.000-07:002009-10-18T04:25:21.995-07:00

Let’s gets the easy one out of the way first. Sartre (Being & Nothingness) summed up the deal on the big fella: God is irrelevant, or to be more accurate, whether God exists or not is irrelevant. The argument is simple: the only thing nobody disputes about God is that if he exists, he didn't compel everybody to believe in him (something of an oversight, if you think about it). It follows from

TFBnoreply@blogger.com0