This is a page containing musings on some reading material that I have brought with me, primarily on John Gray's Straw Dogs.
I have no other reference material with me nor, as I write these notes, access to the Internet, so I rely on memory for any references I make.
The posts relating to Zanzibar are contained on the home page.
Free will comes up at various points in Straw Dogs; the main treatment is in section 11 of The Deception (pp 64-69) entitled Lord Jim’s Jump. Lord Jim is a reference to the novel by Joseph Conrad (which I have not read). The jump in question is a jump to safety from an apparently sinking ship. Jim spends the remainder of the book grappling with the implications of this jump, in which he feels he has betrayed himself and the seaman’s ethic of bravery and service. The question, of course, is “was he responsible for this action, or could he have acted otherwise?” Read more…
John Gray, a philosopher who is much talked about these days, is the anti-philosopher’s philosopher. He is like the fresh-faced young boy who sees that the unquestioned assumptions on which his elders have based their lives are a mixture of unquestioned assumptions, blind faith, self-serving beliefs, riddled with such internal contradictions and fallacies that the whole lot needs to be thrown out and a new start made. Except of course that Gray is not a fresh-faced young boy but a serious thinker, and the elders in question are the vast majority of philosophers, psychologists, sociologists, economists, religious and secular thinkers who have inhabited the human race since the golden age of the hunter gatherer. Read more…