Online research in philosophy

THE FACULTY OF Arts at the University of Sydney is a disaster-area, and not of the merely passive kind, like a bombed building, or an area that has been flooded. It is the active kind, like a badly-leaking nuclear reactor, or an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in cattle.

Just to indicate how this impacted at ground level, when I visited the Uni of NSW round about 1970 an honours student in chemistry who was keeping up with these things told me that Popper was no longer regarded as a leading figure in this field because he had been superseded by Kuhn.

IT PASSES MY understanding how anyone with even a grain of sense can feel pleasure at the prospect of a republican Australia: an Australia, that is to say, even more "base, common and popular" than it is now. Anyway, I am myself for the British connection. In my World XI, Britons - Shakespeare, Purcell, Newton, Hume and Darwin - would be the first five picked. Either to the British exclusively, or to them more than to any other nation, the (...) world owes, and Australia especially owes, whatever it has of scientific knowledge, sober philosophy, stable government without oppression - and cricket. (shrink)

Bing Crosby and Louis Armstrong, at a time when they were both millionaires many times over, recorded a song called "Gone Fishin'". Its theme was as familiar as it was implausible: how they would much rather sit by "some shady, wady pool", etc., than be enmeshed, as they were, in the feverish pursuit of money and fame. The record was a huge success, making the singers even richer and more famous than they had been before: which was, after all, their (...) intention in making it. It will hardly need saying that neither singer ever did in fact renounce show business and "go fishin'" instead; or that this experiment, if it had been tried, would have been an ignominious failure. It has been tried often enough. (shrink)

I BELIEVE THAT the intellectual capacity of women is on the whole inferior to that of men. By "on the whole," I do not mean just "on the average"; though I do mean that much. My belief is, if you take any degree of intellectual capacity which is above e average for the human race, as a whole, then a possessor of that degree of intellectual capacity is a good deal more likely to be man than a woman.