A talk delivered to a meeting organised by the Libertarian Alliance, on 25th June. By George Walford. (The version given here has been lightly edited in the transition from speech to writing). People who write books about doing talks offer several approved ways of beginning. You can start off with a BANG! to grip your… read more »
The major ideologies have been pictorially presented in a variety of ways; as a system of levels, a pyramid, a circle, a series of points on a graph, or as nodes on a line of development. Each presentation illuminates some features of the system. Here ADRIAN WILLIAMS introduces a novel conception, and one likely to… read more »
The adherents of each major ideology tend to see people holding different basic assumptions as not merely mistaken but wrong, both intellectually and morally. A perception of this has led W. B. Gallie to speak of “essentially contested concepts.” [1] These occur, he says, in aesthetics, political and social philosophy and the philosophy of religion,… read more »
WHAT AM I BID FOR LENIN’S BONES? We have long been pointing to the evidence that the USSR (with China not far behind) is moving towards a system which resembles capitalism more closely than communism as Marx envisaged it. Sotheby’s have now capped our efforts by announcing their first sale in Moscow for July 7th…. read more »
(Minor Effort To Announce Dubious Yarns Neatly Allowing More Ideological Commentary) In IC25 (p3) appears a reference to a BBC job carrying the title Engineering Information and Electrical Installation Officer, giving the abbreviation EIEIO; a newspaper article is quoted as the source of information. That job title is inherently suspicious, for there is no obvious… read more »
IC20 referred to Jane Jacobs and her book The Economy of Cities (mistakenly called “The Culture of Cities”). There appears to be no ideological analysis in the article. A suitable position for further comment in IC would be under the heading “If it ain’t bust, don’t fix it.” The report was a summary of Jacobs’… read more »
In IC20, p.4, under the heading “Gernuetlichkeit” there is a brief reference to Austrian wines, diethylene glycol, mountains and anti-freeze. We have it on good (epistatic) authority – the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food – that Austrian wines have been adulterated with diethylene glycol, but what has this to do with antifreeze? Somewhere in… read more »
As explained by Walford (1981) with references back to Harold Walsby’s paper The Paradox Principle and Modular Systems Generally, the particular value of dialectical logic lies in the comprehension of intellectual and social matters. For the process of manipulating the physical world in order to survive as individuals or as a society formal logic is… read more »
On March 11th 1984 the writer and philosopher Stephen Houseman gave a lecture to South Place Ethical Society (SPES) at Conway Hall. It was published, in two parts, in the Ethical Record (ER), monthly journal of SPES, in June and July 1984, under the title “Why Must Man be Rational?” Houseman spoke of two approaches… read more »
In the December 1981 issue of The Bulletin of the British Psychological Society, p.456, Merryl J. Cross, who describes herself as disabled and a psychologist, makes an attack on the orthodox approach used by psychologists in helping the disabled to adjust to their surroundings. The disabled are deemed to be well adjusted according to how… read more »