Trying out Substack

This is how my latest Substack post begins. If you would like to read on, here is a link: https://markenglish.substack.com/p/towpath-reflections?r=3knty7 If this new site (called Parsing the Parade) gets some traction I may put my main focus there and put other sites on the back burner. At this stage, however, it is just an experiment. …

L. L. Zamenhof and Zionism

The other day, walking through a small park in the district of Pietà on my way to Valletta, I was surprised to see a bust of L. L. Zamenhof, the creator of the international auxiliary language known as Esperanto. My first thought was, I didn't know he had a connection with Malta. And, as it …

Shorelines

There is something universal about seas and oceans and even standing on the shore you can sense it. Last year on a beach on a Greek island I was vividly reminded of childhood holidays by the sea on the other side of the world. More recently I have been living in the district of Msida …

AI, work and human dignity

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com Speculations about the impact of AI and imagined technological utopias or dystopias necessarily draw on - and reveal a lot about - our fundamental assumptions about human nature. Robert Gressis recently wrote a piece on these themes. Though his approach is open and undogmatic, his basically metaphysical (and indeed Kantian) …

Dreams, perceptions and delusions

I have never considered dreams – my own or anyone else's – worth recording or trying to analyze in any serious way, but I have always maintained an interest in the various manifestations of consciousness and the functioning – and malfunctioning – of the brain. Doing some sorting recently, I came across some scribbled notes …

Distorting history

Richard Rorty Bharath Vallabha used to be a regular contributor to The Electric Agora. He returned recently with a piece about how, in his view, some of the central and most polarizing debates of post-World War 2 academic philosophy were the product of a misreading of intellectual history. Both Gilbert Ryle and Richard Rorty were …

Individualism and cultural embeddedness

Photo by Ilzy Sousa on Pexels.com My podcast, Culture and Value, is centered around what you could see as the paradox of individualism: we are culturally embedded beings and yet we (or many of us) value individualism. I thought it might be useful to set out in writing – as concisely as possible – some …

Time and physics

Einstein's rejection of the notion of time as we know and experience it was squarely based in classical physics and classical mathematics. One problem with such a view is that it assumes the existence of infinite information (e.g. infinite decimal expansions). Nicolas Gisin, a physicist at the University of Geneva, wants to reformulate standard physics …

Speaking of time

A confusing and (arguably) confused article about time which appeared late last year at The Electric Agora prompted me to set out a few of my own thoughts on perceptions of time and time and language. There is the physics of time (that is, time as it is dealt with and understood in the context …

A few thoughts on intellectual history, abstraction and values.

Terms like “pragmatism” as it applies to philosophy and the history of ideas – most isms really – are intrinsically vague and useful only to the (necessarily limited) extent that they help to bring out persistent or more fleeting strands or commonalities in thinking within or across populations. Even the views of individuals are often …