Art - By Eliza Veretilo



By Eliza Veretilo

The Philosophy Takeaway 'Open Topic' Issue 31

Desperate for meaning, so desperate - By Selim 'Selim' Talat

Desperate for meaning, so desperate

Determinism states that things could not have been different to how they are now. This also means that the future cannot be any different to how it is 'planned' out to be. If we believe that we are just the end of a long chain of cause and effect outside of our control, then the future must also be equally discoverable.

I wish to concentrate on the oldest form of determinism, Fate. Great heroes throughout history have risen up to meet their destiny and do the bidding of Fate. Fate represents a certain form of order or balance that must be restored. With this destiny comes a sense of purpose; an end result that we have to strive for. I wish to demonstrate that, sadly, purpose is not simple, is not black and white, and that beyond humanity there is probably nothing but the slow march of nature.

Everything happens for a reason?

It does not take much imagination to think of a child being born mutated by radioactive waste - this happens every day in certain warzones. If we examine the misfortune of the child on an individual level we quite simply have to ask 'why is this particular child suffering this particular fate?' What could the child have done to deserve being born with such deformities, with a lifespan no greater than a few tortured breaths. There is quite simply no way the child could have deserved or earned this particular situation for some wrong doing. Evidently, if Fate does exist it is greatly unfair, and does not always reward or punish who it is supposed to.

 

Is the child then part of some greater scheme of things? If this is the case, then Fate is not accounting for us on an individual basis, but is considering some larger overall narrative - the horrors of war, for instance, could be part of some fateful plan to end a greater suffering by shocking us with its horrible nature. However if this is the case then why is one individual sacrificed over another? What possible explanation is there for my being born in a materially rich environment and someone else being born in the worst imaginable scenario? It seems random, without reason. Yet fate is not random and it cannot decide lightly who shall live and who shall die, or else it is no longer fate – a reason requires reasoning.

Now we have a greater question. Why is one part of the world suffering the worst imaginable fate (the death of children) when another isn't? This idea of deserving, reaping what one sows, is heavily undermined by the events happening in the world at this very moment. People are not getting what they deserve – the people we would call bad are not being punished, and the people we call good are not always rewarded. Does Fate have a reason to punish the greater percentage of humankind?

Fate is nothing more than a tradition from a more superstitious age. At one time it would have been used to justify the status of the powerful and placate the powerless by assuring them it could not have been any other way. When combined with power, this ability to look into the future with as much certainty as we can look into the past, is a dangerous thing. Clearly it is an idea which could only have survived in a world where knowledge of the world was incomplete. Fate could only exist in a world where progress was slow, or non-existent, with cultures imagining themselves to hold eternal answers to eternal questions; fate could only exist if the thinkers of a culture thought they had reached the end of their development on earth.

  To prove that knowledge of the world decreases the credibility of fate, we need only look at the vast increase in the human population in the last century, the annihilation of diseases and the dramatic raising of our material conditions. If there is a reason for everything, and everything leads back to fate, then this cosmic force has chosen now of all times to populate the earth with humans. Ideas of reincarnation are massively threatened; for once being born human was the sign that your soul was rising up the ladder to nirvana. The simple conclusion from this is that there have been a lot of good tigers around recently. Can you see how absurd a chain of reincarnation (insects at the bottom, humans at the top) would be if it was proposed in our modern world of massive population growth and endless technological change?

So, where do we stand?

Those who claim  they can see into the future should not be written off. How do we know that someone doesn't have visions of what may be, the creativity to combine elements in some incredible way, or some special sensitivity to human character in relation to unseen forces? We do not, and cannot write off people as not possessing these powers. However, the seer or the oracle, when they are so blatantly political, we should be very, very sceptical of; it certainly is not their task to order our societies or tell us what to think.

Is fate then a comfort to people in an age where god has fallen as a power? I cannot see how it can be a comfort to know that some cosmic power has given myself a well-functioning body and some other person severe mutations and a painfully brief life Suffering does not need to be explained away with fate, because suffering is not inevitable.

There is probably no purpose beyond humanity. It strikes me as odd why we would need to search for powers beyond the world, to explain the world, when there is so much on offer in good old human greed, ignorance, violence, apathy, and so on. Going back to the children being cursed to short and painful lives, we can explain it in purely human terms – that is, societies still going to war with one another without universal regard for human life. Human beings are more concerned with their own immediate experiences and not so much on distant people they consider different to them, or mere statistics. This is an earthly explanation for suffering that makes sense.

  And take note. We do not need to wait for some afterlife to win what we would call justice. We could have it today if only we were empowered to do so (and if only we could philosophize until we came up with an adequate explanation for it!).

By Selim 'Selim' Talat

The Philosophy Takeaway 'Open Topic' Issue 31

I once heard: The Fallacy of an Accomplished Species. - By Eliza Veretilo

I once heard: The Fallacy of an Accomplished Species.

My title refers to a very popular idea that roams the planet nowadays, that human beings as we are now are the end result of evolution. Let me tell you: ha-ha. The fact that your life experience is happening now in the year 2012 when the theory of Evolution is such a widely accepted one and we know that many species have changed and adapted to be what they are, that does not by any means mean that we are a finished product. We are still at baby stage my friend; child stage is even pushing it. Look around you; can you see all the still un-actualised potential that composes the human landscape? Do you SEE it? Can you see the thousands of human beings that can’t be and become what they can become, all of us, in this struggle, unable to achieve a better self. The fact that evolution has taken us to this stage does not by any means mean we are an accomplished species. We have done a lot, but we have much more to do.

This is what I call the fallacy of an accomplished species. The sad thought that everything that could be invented, has been invented, the sad thought that we have reached our physical final shape and that our planet will not change anymore because its fine the way it is. Fortunately my friend, it’s changing and it will keep changing. Change is constant, along with life. The arrogant idea that planet Earth, and us humans with it, have finished our evolution process is a very mistaken one. The planet will do all the shifts that it needs, and we will also change. In my humble opinion, if we were a bit wiser, we would work WITH this Earth changes rather than against them. We are not at the top of the game. Every empire once thought that they were the highest evolution, the highest achievement. The end of the chain. We have seen too many giants rise and fall to really believe that we are the end result of evolution, which is what history tells us. This is an ongoing process, in which the whole Universe partakes.

Here in planet Earth we move at the pace of the slowest. So, whenever you see somebody doing something that you consider not very intelligent, think about this: everyone has their own long path to go, their growth to experience, they lessons to gather. We are not the ones to judge at what stage of evolution we are, but one thing is for sure, this is not the end. And if you do agree with the teachings of the theory of Evolution, I hope you agree that we are not the finished product, but we are still being shaped by it, and shaping it too, as we are part of nature and our actions influence the whole human race. Bye-bye.

By Eliza Veretilo

The Philosophy Takeaway 'Open Topic' Issue 31

On the Island of Despair and the Magic of Friendship. - By Edward Hobson

On the Island of Despair and the Magic of Friendship.

To shamelessly recycle a previously used metaphor, it is as difficult to know what’s going on in someone else’s mind as it is to know what’s going on in someone else’s country.  Though, I find that never stops anyone from attempting to do just that. In both cases. What genuinely interests me though, about the human mind, is not so much the modus operandi of “I know you but you don’t know me”, but the innate solitude of the mind. Any mind. This was, for a time the first limit of the mind that came to me when I started writing on this, but more on that later. The first fact of life is that the mind you have is the only one you will have full knowledge of, and, by extension the only thing you can never be in error of. Not in the sense that you can never be in error in your beliefs, or feelings, but in the sense that you know what is going on in your own mind. We don’t often think about this though, as to do so is, frankly, a bit of a downer. To do so is to see that we are alone on a desert island with only a simple palm tree, and our own carvings in the sand for company, surrounded by an expanse of unknowable, abysmal ocean. With theory and delusion we attempt to sail away from this small speck of land, and I’ll argue that the most delusional of all is The Delusion of Love. For more on the innate ability of love to break down barriers of varying manner, transcend the bitterest of conflict, and unleash an almighty, righteous beam of atomic amour, (often pink or purple) see Love, The Power Of.

Tales of someone who made a catastrophic error of judgement by loving another person unconditionally to such an extent they were unable to see that the balance of affection between one partner and the other was somewhat asymmetrical cover our real life anecdotes, books and films like shipwrecks littering the bottom of the aforementioned ocean. Though, from this perspective, love is always doomed to fail, as to love unconditionally is to suspend all critical faculty, to let down our guard of critical vigilance to breach the shores of the island of despair, and find that we can know another mind as well as we know ourselves, to be as sure that we know something else about the world, outside or our minds, as well as we know our own. From the sound of things it looks as if I’ve painted a rather bleak picture, so what are we to do? The main solution, it seems, is to be in love with a philosopher who is in recognition that to love something is to love it unconditionally, but that critical faculty should be maintained. Since that is easier said than done, the more convenient answer, to myself at least, is to be happier with solitude.  There’s nothing to stop you from carving a Mona Lisa into the sand on your little solitary island, and once your learn that said island is surrounded by a metaphorical sea of error, one comes to appreciate its beauty. We go through life terrified of error and also of solitude, in a culture which coordinates error with weakness, and solitude with bitterness and abnormality.

To stay on familiar ground, railing at “the culture”, and how it is often the greatest stumbling block to the expansion of the mind beyond its limits, I draw the example which was virtually inescapable to anyone who was on the internet in 2011, which is the phenomenon of the “Bronies”. The Bronies (a portmanteau of the half word Bro and the proper word Pony) are males who are fans of the animated television series My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. A study of the Brony community conducted this year called “The Brony Study” found that most respondents were in their teens to late twenties, were educated at a college or university level, and that 81% identified as heterosexual. This contradicts the popular first hand assumption anyone who has just found out about the bronies in our culture might have made. I’m willing to bet the first image that came to mind, unless you are in fact a brony or (female equivalent) pegasister, when I said grown men were watching My Little Pony was that of a basement dweller, emotionally stunted half-wit, or unrealistically camp homosexual. The fact that Friendship is Magic is a show for little girls does bring some confusion to the fore, namely over why grown men would want to genuinely, not ironically, want to watch and celebrate a show about small multicolour horses learning about the magic of friendship. Sometimes the reaction is of outright anger or derision.

Speaking as someone who has seen the show, I propose the reason is that it’s actually a good show, regardless of who it was created for. John Stewart Mill said that we accept as normal that which is usual, and let us recall that at the outset of World War One the French Army decided to kit out their soldiers in bright pink trousers, as it was considered an aggressive, martial colour, and later abandoned their use when it became apparent they made their frontline troops stick out on the battlefield like a rainforest on Mars. There was also a time when it was unbecoming for women to wear trousers.

The mind is limited, by perception, and it is the duty of art and media, to change our perception. Bronies are changing the nature of masculinity, and are expanding their perception beyond the cultural demands of what it means to possess the Y chromosome, and thus breaching the limits of the mind. So I suppose what you can take away from this is; don’t be afraid to be alone or wrong, as we’ll spend much of our time being both before we’re done here, and that what seems unusual may not be as abnormal or detrimental as it first seems.

Friendship sure is Magic,

By Edward Hobson

The Philosophy Takeaway 'Open Topic' Issue 31

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The Philosophy Takeaway 'Open Topic' Issue 31

Missing person - By Ellese Elliott

Missing person

What if my soul has gone?

Because it could not take the pain

Left me empty and without song

For my mind to weave itself insane

Did it fly into the heavens?

And leave me to dwell below the stars

Alone, with no friends among men

To drown myself at the bar

There is no sunlight, rain nor thunder

No longer does my world appear the same

Through the eyes which bare no sentient perceiver

Through a body which merely holds a name

No longer do I dwell among the living

Nor can I seek comfort among the dead

Merely a being full of air; breathing

Likened to a stick man with a head

The future is grim.

O what am I to do?

By Ellese Elliott

The Philosophy Takeaway 'Open Topic' Issue 31

Art by Eliza Veretilo

This weeks artist was Eliza Veretilo: http://neonsuitcase.blogspot.co.uk/

The Philosophy Takeaway 'Open Topic' Issue 30

Before we have taken a step... - By Selim 'Selim' Talat

Before we have taken a step...

...on the path to wisdom, what baggage do we carry with us? Is it possible to lighten the burden we have had limbered upon us, from parental teaching, from state schools, from utopian propaganda solutions (advertising), from entertainment, and from the structure of thought we are born into, known as our culture! I think so.

Crossing cultures to understand our own

To try and understand ourselves we should strive to understand others, to create a contrast of our similarities and differences. The cultural barriers that threaten this understanding are great, but not impassable. We run the risk of imposing our world view on another culture (an intellectual violence) if we are too arrogant and of exoticizing them if we are too romantic.

  It is a challenge, but one that is worth it. For initially we will look upon the cultural mirror of another from a western mindset, but as we grow more familiar with 'the other side' through our interpretation of their ideas, we can start to think like 'the other side', and soon it is not so unfamiliar!

Here are two simple examples of how understanding chinese philosophy can help us realize ourselves and expand our minds.

  The alphabetic greek language was more suited to abstract thinking and the development of theory, whereas the pictoral chinese language lent itself to creating 'concrete images'. Now at present I do not understand chinese and so cannot say how the language conditions a person to think in a different way, yet I can realize through this that our way of doing things is not the only way, and that if I were to learn a pictographic language my mind could be greatly expanded (and vice versa).

  The second example concerns a thinker considered the father of western philosophy - Plato. The great man would have us lost in a cave, staring at shadows on a wall created by the light behind us. We are ignorant creatures by birth, who require an understanding of perfect transcendent forms  (beyond our mundane realm) to gain true knowledge and to stare at the light at the mouth of the cave. There is in the west a distinction between two absolutes, two great opposites; in this case ignorance and knowledge. This highlights a general theme of the western human, as an unsettled creature within nature, unable to trust itself and searching for proof of truth beyond itself. The briefest look at chinese philosophy on the other hand, will reveal a mindset of belonging to nature, of being a part of nature. Yin and Yang are one combined whole. There is no cave here and no need to 'discover' transcendent forms because the thinker has already taken it for granted that we are already part of any greater philosophical truth.

  By realizing that people think differently, we can see the 'intellectual strings' dangling above our heads and feel that our freedom is actually closer to puppethood, as we have accepted so much as obvious, that is not so obvious after all. Not everyone in the world takes for granted what we do - and we do not take for granted what they do!

Forward is not quite so simple...

Before we have taken a single step how many have we taken backwards?

- Dogmatic thinking (of an optimistic or pessimistic nature) funnels truth into perverse shapes and moulds the world around an idea, rather than moulding an idea around the world.

 

- We must constantly be on guard - against ourselves! Forever renewing or discarding old contracts and interpreting ourselves in a new way every so often can be an effective defence against our prejudices.

 

- Just observing things as they are is an exciting philosophical adventure and impossible to take for granted: Are you seeing things that exist outside of you, or are they only given solidity by your observing them (are they even there at all, or a creation of our minds?). It is so complex, so many layers surround everything.

 

-To get to the stage we are at now, we had to overcome superstition - our default world view was not - 'it is what it is', but 'it is because some supernatural force made it so'.

- How many of us think we are better than everyone else, for having some special piece of information?

More importantly, where are all of these threads leading to! It is time to knot them together. The truth of the matter is we are all sometimes victims of self-deception, and we have all been branded by hideous stamping machines trying to convince us to move in certain directions at the threat of force, religious doom, social exclusion, and so on.

  Before we can take a single step on the path to wisdom we must realize this weight of baggage upon our backs. Is it discardable? Is it necessary? Is it inevitable? That is for you to decide.

By Selim 'Selim' Talat

The Philosophy Takeaway 'Open Topic' Issue 30

The Limitations of Freedom - By Sean Ash

The Limitations of Freedom

 To understand the path to absolute freedom, it is paramount for the individual to first understand 'what is prison?'. If freedom is to become more tangible where it is completely understood and fully employed then one must first experience and undergo the greatest extents of captivity. This is because one must experience being held captive so that they can truly understand what freedom truly is in its entirety. It is exactly the same principle applied for one experiencing life to understand death. If you have not yet existed, you cannot understand life. Just because someone knows the culture in the West and has read of the culture in the East, it does not necessarily mean they will absolutely know the culture in the East. They will know and understand some truths but never the absolute Truth. It is the same for those of the educated; one is simply not born educated but they become educated. Ergo, one must first be uneducated to be educated; unconscious to be conscious and dead to be alive. Being 'not' something is imperative to becoming something. There has to be space to find movement.

      This same principle can be applied to absolutely anything and everything because it is a principle that works in every case. For words it is the synonym and antonym as a dialectical process to the synthesis of synantononym. Clearly there is no definition of 'synantononym' and it is the same with the after life; we prescribe our own beliefs as to what it might mean. It is possible that absolutely anything could be ascribed to this word. However, it would deduct the blood line from which it came. Therefore, it can only come to life through the genes of both parents, and something that represents two different things. The after life must then be a make up of both metaphysical and physical as we are moving forward in time and not backwards. If evolution is the case, it makes no sense going back to a state we have already existed in as it is not productive and contradicts any purpose of movement thus making it arbitrary. Therefore, if purpose is to be Truth, then it can only manifest our moving from non-existence to existence which means that within the third must exist both. This means that when we die, we are made up of both existence and non-existence at the same time. We will no longer B(-eing) but we will C (see).

      For many, freedom is something that is fought for on many battle fields but freedom cannot be truly explained or put into place and it never will. It simply cannot function here. It is like a man going into space without a space suit. Freedom cannot exist here in this reality as it simply does not belong here. It would be like looking around and trying to find God. We have the concepts of such things, that is true, but we must await the next life to find the answers. As for now, we simply make the answers up so that we can put to rest dead-end philosophy. Dead-end philosophy is a type of philosophy that simply cannot be answered as it is like starting at a point of A to then ending back at A without ever reaching B, and B does exactly the same so that no truths ever clash. They have only stayed within their own prison cells to remain live.

      To end, man lives out his life trying to escape the inevitable. He has the freedom in his sight only he does not have a clue what it truly looks like, what it feels like to have and what such a word could mean. It is a contested concept that can only ever be explained outside the walls of prison. We are prisoners to our own bodies while we live in this reality and so we can only ever experience a state of freedom when we are dead. For those that convince themselves to be either governors or prisoners in life, whatever you should convince yourself to be in this life you shall be the opposite in the next. It's not so bad being a prisoner, should this be the case, just as it is not so bad to experience darkness as the only thing that can possibly come from it is freedom and light.

By Sean Ash

The Philosophy Takeaway 'Open Topic' Issue 30

A young girls dream

When I was a little girl

I decided I was to save the world

I felt others pain and sadness

And that our society was subject to madness

Yet as a child I had no means

No idea how, nor any money in my jeans

But knew the journey I would take

And the decisions I would make

When I arrived at puberty

Quickly everything became about me

The latest fashion was my obsession

And my happiness was determined by possessions

But it did not take long to realize

That these ideals were lies

And that the dream around me

Had been created by the enemy

Then a number of circumstances

Were to sabotage my chances

But a skein I grabbed onto

And unraveled some helpful clues

I pieced them together

I forgot I was so clever

And the picture was philosophy

And it was intended for me

Anon, I travelled this path

And rekindled my ability to laugh

At what was so much nonsense?

But slowly made more and more sense

But locked in a lingual cage

That had been kept secret from age to age

How would one steal?

This truth to then reveal

This is how I would save the world

The dream I prophesized as a little girl

To bring philosophy to the masses

So they could save their own asses.

Ellese Elliott

The Philosophy Takeaway 'Open Topic' Issue 30

Picking out Strands: more on –emic/etic - By Martin Prior

Picking out Strands: more on –emic/etic

In earlier issues I have talked about the –emic/etic dichotomy, and scientific socialism.  This appeared in my ‘maroon socialism’ diagram, which I have annotated variously:

From Issue  20, on Purpose of Life... “There is no purpose of life...and all people are equal in pursuing it”	From Issue 22, on Language... “emic and etic – Language, Philosophy and Society”

Socialism is a relationship between society (inner) and the environment (outer).  There are several steps, firstly creating a semi-tamed environment, and then a ‘tamed environment’.  Note that the maroon is associated with culture, and pink with skills, technology and not least scientific socialism.  The –emic is associated with social conventions as to what equals what, and in technology we must be ready to challenge this.  Now picking out strands is an essential feature of scientific socialism, and very relevant to this is hypercorrection, introduced in the Issue 20 for situations where strands are insufficiently unravelled.  This is clearly understood by phonologists in language study – for example popping in H’s such as ‘helsewhere’ - but I also believe we can talk of ‘ethical hypercorrection’ in ethics.  And in picking out strands, the methodology does not differ significantly from market research, though this is notably a micro-analysis. 

Picking out strands is important for identifying relevant social factors: some people may see the institution of marriage as one of a number of social evils, as did Robert Owen in the earlier part of the 19^th Century.  But if one looks at the arguments, surely the problem is that wives had restricted property rights.  So is the issue one of marriage as a whole, or the emancipation of women as a whole?

The concept of ethical hypercorrection came to me in the ’Seventies when I felt there were flaws in some feminists arguments: I have discussed this in Issue 26 on Gender (‘Sexism: ) primarily in connection with gender rôles, picking out two strands, rôles within the household and those outside, and considered the combination of rôles, leaving aside questions of innate propensity to motherhood, or indeed any other aptitude; combination of rôles was sufficient to my point.  But ethical hypercorrection is a challenge for all progressive movements: people sense some flaw they can’t finger on, and are tempted to see progressive ideas as refuted.  Thus we should not be tempted to pursue some path such as ‘post-feminism’ and perhaps ‘post-modernism’.

In the diagram below I put forward the model in which the ethical hypercorrection appears.  The diagram comes from an article under preparation which has been shelved for some while (and indeed the first part related to dialectical materialism, which I didn’t really get to grips with):

-etic, -emic and hypercorrection

I shall outline this diagram by focussing on the two appearances of ‘association’: the first example appears between ‘concept’ and ‘realisation’.  We acquire a concept by associating it with its range of realisations and deciding they are the same sort of thing.  Thus in a language we learn a colour, which is realised in various shades.  The second example of an association relates something created with its perception: babies learn to associate what they hear with how it is articulated, and sound-waves transmit what is spoken to the hearer.

In each case association can take various forms, such as hearing, teaching and evolving.  Thus some forms of association are passive and others are active.  To my mind my mind culture relates to passive association and technology to active association.

Now an important tool for picking out strands, not least for scientific socialism, is the discipline of statistics, and below is a scheme for analysis:

 

level (in some instances known as ‘moments’)	description	Example
1st	averages, e.g. mean	social and economic aggregates and trends
2nd	variability, e.g. variance or ‘standard deviation’	random appearance of momentous individuals with varying effect
3rd	skewness	e.g. income effects
4th	{multi-normality}, kurtosis or ‘bulgingness’, ‘stragglingness’	hetero/homogeneity of communities, degree to which results are distorted by exceptions

Let us look at the interaction of trends and random effects, and here I would like to consider the rise of Hitler: Hitler led the Nazi movement in the ’Twenties and ’Thirties before finally coming to power.  But the thing that gave the movement the real momentum was the economic conditions after the Wall Street crash.  However by early 1933, the Nazis appeared to have passed their peak, and might well have declined further, but President Hindenburg felt that it would be helpful if Hitler were allowed to lead the German working classes rather than the socialists and communists, and appointed him Chancellor - with a cabinet with only one other Nazi – thinking in this way the left could be controlled.  So here we had the combination of a social trend with a random effect.

So we have something akin to which came first the chicken or the egg: perhaps, since the chicken lays more than egg, the social trend is the chicken, and the random effect the egg.

But now let us look at the requirements for identifying key elements, which I might call a ‘dialectic scheme’ – perhaps as a token gesture to the much misunderstood dialectical materialism:

(i)                 To identify at least three strands in a society, there must be at least three observations, likewise for any number.

(ii)               Over and above these strands there will be random effects, sometimes known as ‘catastrophes’, whose effects will be cumulative and which will require additional observations to those required to identify the various strands in society.

(iii)             In a set of ethical values, there must be at least one axiom for each type of relationship.

(iv)             In any set of policies, there must be as many tools as there are objectives.

The idea of picking out strands has a mathematical parallel: if our ideas are expressed mathematically, strands correspond to variables and observations to simultaneous equations.

I italicised the above phrase ‘whose effects will be cumulative’, since one must beware of mixing preferred hypotheses with method, which seemed to me a fault in the approaches of both Marxists and anti-Marxists in my limited understanding of dialectical materialism.  But in fact for statisticians at least, it is a much stronger assumption – though often made – that random effects are not cumulative and in fact independent.  Furthermore cumulative random effects are likely to seriously obscure the underlying trends, social and indeed otherwise.

I have in fact extended this dialectic scheme, and let us turn to item (iv), the idea that in any set of policies, especially economic, there must be as many tools as there are objectives.  This point, which has a mathematical basis, came to me from New Zealand economist the Wolfgang Rosenberg, who was active in New Zealand opposing the neo-liberal policies of the Labour Finance minister Roger Douglas in the ‘Eighties.  In addition, to look at item (iii), I have already introduced the idea in my introduction that in a set of ethical values, there must be at least one axiom for each type of relationship.  In formal logic we need axioms for one proposition, for two propositions and for three propositions, though we do not need any for four or more since a combination of the above will suffice.

By Martin Prior