These past two weeks have seen an escalation in ecological activism with protesters taking control of the arteries of major cities in the UK, bringing traffic to a standstill, in order to force radical action on the government regarding climate control. While I feel encouraged by young people taking action over an issue they are… Continue reading Climate change as a scientific paradigm (part 1)
Author: Don Trubshaw
Don Trubshaw is a co-founder of the website Societal Values. He has a PhD in the philosophy and sociology of education and teaches in Higher Education.
Beauty: more than the eye of the beholder (part 2)
Changes in the apperception of the beautiful across historical time and the very individuality of the experience of beauty, have led to a false doctrine of the relativity of beauty and the negation of the idea that there is anything essential, constant or communicable regarding beauty. In fact, the history of the development of knowledge… Continue reading Beauty: more than the eye of the beholder (part 2)
The Soul of the World: Teilhard de Chardin’s Evolutionary Pantheism and its Challenge to Secular Humanism
Despite the obvious attractions of secular humanism, particularly in freeing individuals from conformity to religious doctrines unsupported by science, and by transcending religious particularism and exclusivity by focusing on the universality of the human experience, there are several problems with it. One is, at a fundamental philosophical level, there is no more evidence (there might… Continue reading The Soul of the World: Teilhard de Chardin’s Evolutionary Pantheism and its Challenge to Secular Humanism
Beauty: more than the eye of the beholder (part 1)
In my estimation there is no more perverse doctrine than that which states that ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’. Not because it is not true that the experience of beauty is apprehended and appreciated at the level of individual perception, which is, in some sense, a redundant observation, but because of the… Continue reading Beauty: more than the eye of the beholder (part 1)
Book Review: Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life
London: Allen Lane, 2018; 412 pages, paper, £20 Jordan Peterson is one of a new wave of public intellectuals who have become known primarily through the medium of their presence on You Tube. Initially, he used the medium to broadcast his lectures given at the University of Toronto. However, he became more widely known about… Continue reading Book Review: Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life
Individualism and Absolute Values: the Fundamentals of a Free Society
Since antiquity, and particularly after Plato, philosophers have pondered on the question of the absolute values, of truth, beauty and goodness. Now, just as then, there have been advocates of their status as real, as well as sceptics. The twentieth century was mostly a sceptical period, although I predict a revival of interest presently, given… Continue reading Individualism and Absolute Values: the Fundamentals of a Free Society
The value of the self: three views on privacy in the digital age (part 2)
“All that is solid melts into air” (Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto) The most fundamental revolution and radical transformation of human nature and society may already be under way. The last vestiges of organic society are being eroded from human experience as we move towards becoming a totally virtual society. The organic ties that… Continue reading The value of the self: three views on privacy in the digital age (part 2)
Antagonistic Tribalism: the cement of political extremism
Being that we are tribal in nature and have lived in tribal cultures for far longer than we have lived in individualistic ones, there is a strong propensity to be swayed by appeals to tribalistic urges, including negative propaganda, negative rumours and negative stereotypes. Sometimes we need no external catalyst, but are primed to categorise someone and assume the worst of someone on the basis of a perceived shared identity, ignoring and collapsing the likely complex self-identity of individuals on the basis of limited information and experience. This tendency is countered most effectively by personal knowledge of people from many different backgrounds
Playing the game: sport and virtue
As I write this, England will or will not be on the way to the finals of the World Cup, and that matter, like the fate of Schrödinger’s cat, will have been settled by the time this article is posted. Although I played (badly) as a boy, I have assiduously avoided following football as it… Continue reading Playing the game: sport and virtue
Zeno and the philosophical conundrum of pure reasoning
It was the pre-Socratic thinker Parmenides who first mooted the idea (as far as we know) in a document, only fragments of which survive in the writings of later philosophers,1 that all movement and development is illusory. His disciple Zeno developed this insight through a series of subtle paradoxes, over which philosophers and logicians have… Continue reading Zeno and the philosophical conundrum of pure reasoning