In ‘Experimental ordinary language philosophy: a cross-linguistic investigation of default inferences’,(Synthese, 2019) Eugen Fischer, Paul Engelhard, Joachim Horvath and Hiroshi Ohtani seek to take experimental philosophy beyond the study of intuitions and highlight links to one of its historical precursors.
Here we have to look at a broader literature and make some inferences, but a pattern does seem to emerge. First, agnostics and atheists tend to score higher than believers on tests of intellectual ability such as standard IQ tests. Religious skeptics score more highly than believers on both the verbal and the quantitative sections …
There are many ways to classify the myriad systems of belief about the nature of the world and humanity’s relationship to it, but for present purposes a very simple distinction between two broad categories will do. In the accompanying table, I include a third category for the sake of completeness. I will return to it …
Many people introduced to Stoicism by twenty-first-century popularizers are surprised by the religious nature of the philosophy. The deafening silence on this topic leaves most people unaware of the deep religious piety of the Stoics.
Attempts to define mystical experience have been as diversified and as conflicting as attempts to interpret and assess its significance. This is not surprising, for the language used to express and describe mystical experience is richly paradoxical, figurative, and poetical.
Betting is cognitive and entertaining, and for many people it is a very profitable business. The essence of it is that: the bookmaker offers you to bet, according to the coefficient she sets, that a sporting event will occur. The bookmaker determines the coefficient, from the probability in his opinion of betting, the coefficient may …
If you bring together two enigmas, do you get a bigger enigma, or do they cancel each other out, like multiplied negative numbers, to produce clarity? The latter, I hope, as I take on Wittgenstein and mysticism.
Merry-Go-Round and Other Words by Bryn Fortey Introduction by Johnny Mains Cover art by Peter Coleborn ISBN 978-0-9573489-2-4 Bryn Fortey has enjoyed a lifelong flirtation with words. His first sale was “A Saleable Commodity” to International Storyteller in 1969. Bryn’s first horror story publication was “Prison” in David Sutton’s New Writings in Horror & The Supernatural 1 in 1971. The similarly titled New Writings in …
Invent-10n by Rod Rees. Artwork by Nigel Robinson ISBN 978-0-9573489-5-0 This is the signed, limited edition of 100 copies. Greetings Gate, let’s Agitate. Look over your shoulder. Do you see the camera? Then dig that even as you read these words of sedition and denial you are being watched by the ever e-quisitive National Protection Agency. The National …
‘The Smith of Hockley’ by James Brogden The Midas Scorpion was an assassin’s tool of the Elder World, from a time long before there were distinctions between magic and machine, or life and art, or death and love. It was made of gold, finely articulated, with a single bead of poison still on the tip …