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Index: Psychology, Philosophy & Education

Philosophy as a personal journey.

Wednesday, 16 June 2010

Anthony O’Hear: The picture of philosophy which I am here sketching, in which philosophy is part of a rational, but personal quest for meaning might not be recognised in many philosophy departments (or not by their students, anyway), and would be hard to discern in many of the most acclaimed philosophical writings of to-day.

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Straws in the religious wind?

Friday, 28 May 2010

Anthony O’Hear: It is interesting to see in these three very different books some thoughtful intellectuals demurring from the secularism which had until recently reigned virtually unchallenged among the self-professed thinking classes.

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Far from the clockwork universe.

Tuesday, 18 May 2010

Anthony O’Hear: Perhaps our days are not quite so tolerant, after all. The two figures who loom over the book as a whole and over many of the individual chapters are the now largely forgotten nineteenth century writers, Andrew Dickson White and John William Draper. Both argued noisily and vociferously that religion in general and Christianity, especially Catholic Christianity, in particular had been major obstacles to scientific progress and discovery, and it is against this view that most of the articles are directed.

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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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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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Darwinian Tensions.

Thursday, 17 December 2009

Anthony O’Hear: In 2011 it is hard not be disturbed Darwin’s casual reference to the elimination of endless numbers of lower races, and even more by the way this sort of thinking was taken up by his followers such as Haeckel and von Treitschke, who in turn influenced Hitler. Moreover the remark in question is all of a piece with the teaching of The Descent of Man, even if more forcefully expressed.

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