About
I hope what I have written (and continue to write and rewrite) might be of benefit to mature learners and philosophically disposed scientists like myself. It would be arrogant to believe that I could contribute to the thinking of professional philosophers or those with a very deep and extensive interest in the subject, so this site is not aimed at them.
For a General Readership ?
As a fan of the online magazine Aeon, and the BBC Radio 4 programme and podcast ‘In Our Time’, which deals with the ‘history of ideas’, I have attempted to write for fellow readers and listeners and so have aimed at people of a reflective disposition. Nevertheless, I have chosen not to delve into the world of ancient Greek philosophy and religiously inspired thought, although I acknowledge that much of our intellectual culture in the West has its very early origins there.
As some readers might not be familiar with vocabulary and ideas used here I have provided links to commonly used free sources of information such as Wikipedia, the Internet Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (listed in increasing order of impenetrability). Wikipedia is used frequently because the links to relevant articles are likely to work in the long term and because the content can be publicly challenged. [See the editors’ discussion page about Attribution/Role of truth in Wikipedia articles for example.]
I have been influenced by many online videos, particularly from the Philosophy Overdose Chanel of YouTube, which I highly recommend if you have the time and inclination to listen to long videos. Dutch philosopher Victor Gijsbers’s philosophy education chanel contains extensive playlists of his talks on epistemology and some classic philosophical books and professionally written papers. The Carneades.org philosophy education chanel has hundreds of useful very short videos. (For the author’s take on these videos see https://www.carneades.org/about-us/.) I have created the Putnam Speaking and Rorty Speaking playlists on Youtube.
There are three philosophy podcasts I particularly enjoy; Philosophy Bites, The Philosopher’s Zone, and the In Our Time Philosophy Podcasts. There are almost too many good philosophy books to mention. However, if you want to learn philosophy without attending classes Simon Blackburn’s ‘A Dictionary of Philosophy‘ might prove useful. For more advanced reading, the websites of professional academic philosophers, or sites like Philpapers or ResearchGate can be a great source of free professionally publications. JD Norton is a shining example of a philosopher making his material publically available, including free books relevant to this site.
The Use of AI
Up till March 2024 when the sentences below were published no text on this site has been created by large language models or ‘generative artificial intelligence’, even though they are capable of outputting very fluent and informed prose relevant to philosophy. If you do not believe me read the following sentences produced by a LLM at my prompting:
“The pragmatist’s stance on truth is one of humility and dynamism, recognizing that each claim to knowledge is but a hypothesis tested against the crucible of experience. In this view, human fallibility is not a flaw to be lamented, but a condition to be embraced, for it is through the acknowledgment of our epistemic limitations that we open ourselves to growth and learning. Thus, truth is not a static treasure to be unearthed but a dynamic construct to be continually reshaped in the light of ongoing inquiry and practical application.”
“truths are provisional, subject to revision and replacement in the face of new experiences and better solutions. This humble acknowledgment of our epistemic limitations is not a resignation but a liberation, freeing us to adapt and evolve our understanding of the world”
One way I presently use the LLM’s is to ask questions concerning ideas that I have. One long answer from a GPT-4 subscription might help me validate one sentence or partial sentence I have drafted. I am less puritanical about the creation of imaginative artistic illustrations, so those which appear here were created by repeatedly prompting AI systems.
A Personal Note
An explanatory autobiographical note about how it is that I come to write on these topics can be found here >
Steve Campbell, Glasgow, Scotland 2024
(Version 5)
(This web site was formerly at another URL until a technical glitch happened and all was temporarily lost!)