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Monthly Archives: January 2010

Event: Memorial reading for poet David Franks. Still not a great painter.

Saturday, 30 January 2010

I am not a great painter. I am not dead. There are significant differences between Oskar Kokoschka and myself, yet I must understand him if I am to understand myself.

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The science of the desert.

Friday, 29 January 2010

Not all climatologists seek the truth about global warming in comfortable university labs. Some look for evidence of desertification in the field.

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Comte, on his birthday.

Tuesday, 19 January 2010

19 JANUARY 2010 – Today is the anniversary of the birth, in 1798, of Auguste Comte. Comte had little use for journalists – ironic, since it was a class of British “higher” journalists, led by Lewes, Morley and Harrison, who elevated the odd and nearly-unreadable French philosopher to everlasting prominence. And he is still in the news today.

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Comte at 212.

Tuesday, 19 January 2010

Comte had little use for journalists – ironic, since it was 19th century British “higher” journalists, led by Fortnightly stalwarts Lewes, Morley and Harrison, who elevated the odd and nearly-unreadable French philosopher to everlasting prominence.

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Scientific predictions.

Thursday, 14 January 2010

The world, this one anyway, is going to end. But when and how is the anybody’s-guess part.

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The End of Reason.

Thursday, 14 January 2010

Anthony O’Hear: One of philosophy’s longest known but best concealed secrets is that science itself is, in a certain sense, irrational. Its irrationality derives from the fact that scientific knowledge, if we have any, depends on the assumption that the universe is ordered, at least to the extent that things we have observed and discovered in the past are a good guide to the future we have not yet experienced.

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On the Dread and Dislike of Science.

Sunday, 10 January 2010

George Henry Lewes: In the struggle of life with the facts of existence, Science is a bringer of aid; in the struggle of the soul with the mystery of existence, Science is a bringer of light. As doctrine and discipline its beneficence is far-reaching. Yet this latest-born of the three great agents of civilisation—Religion, Common-Sense, and Science—is so little appreciated by the world at large that even men of culture may still be found who boast of their indifference to it, while others regard it with a vague dread which expresses itself in a dislike, sometimes sharpened into hatred. [This article is published with an attached comment by P. Anderson-Morshead.]

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The Fortnightly Review