The influential wrongness of AJ Ayer
Ayer’s work tells us important things about the shortcomings of Anglophone philosophy. Blog for Prospect.
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Tag: Reason & rationality
Is reason the slave of the passions?
In debate with Simon Jenkins about David Hume’s bold challenge to the primacy of pure logical thinking, in Prospect.
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How nudge theory is ageing well
Review of Cass Sunstein’s two new books in the FT
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The incoherence of evidence-based policy
Values, not data, are the basis of policy. The job of evidence is to inform policy-making to maximise the chances that any given reform achieves the ideological goal. It cannot tell us what that goal should be.
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John Humphrys’s dismal legacy
After 32 years on BBC Radio Four’s flagship news programme, Today, John Humphrys has told the Daily Mail that he is “assuming” he’ll leave the programme this year. Unfortunately, his legacy will be a style of interviewing that has made our news media less, not better equipped to give our politicians the scrutiny and interrogation a healthy democracy needs…
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