Tag: Reason & rationality

Confused? Maybe you’re not drinking enough

Articles & Essays, Food

We seem to have bought into a computational, ledger-based model of health which breaks everything down into its constituent parts and counts what goes in and out. Look at the reports I’ve highlighted and the key concepts are “BMI”, “calories” and “units of alcohol”, all things that can be measured and then used to create rulers with which to measure us. Our bodies, however, are more complicated than that. They are systems in which all the different elements work together. As soon as you try to isolate one, you lose the bigger picture and can easily be led astray.

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Are men from Mars and women from Venus?

The Shrink and The Sage

If men are from Mars and women are from Venus, that would explain why philosophy so often reads like Martian. Both in the UK and the US, women account for only around a fifth of philosophers in the academy, fewer than in most comparable disciplines. Does this suggest there is something essentially masculine about philosophy, that cold, hard logic comes much more naturally to the less touchy-feely sex?

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Have we become too assertive?

The Shrink and The Sage

In philosophy as in science, “mere assertion” is the lower than lowest form of argument, being not more than baseless pontification. Yet in much of everyday life, assertion is king. Much of what passes for discussion of serious issues, for example, is actually little more than people taking it in turns to state their opinions and dismiss those of others. Instead of trying to understand each other, they merely stay quiet and listen for as short a time as is decent before simply resuming their own monologue…

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