Sublime

“To be is to be perceived,” said the Irish philosopher George Berkeley (1685–1753). We exist and give existence by virtue of perception. Berkeley meant that God’s omniscient perception maintains all things. For a moralist—and Berkeley was a bishop—this could mean you’re never out of the sight of God, so you’d better be good! For a metaphysician, “E

human belief systems are good at absorbing contradictions into their thinking.

From this vantage point, verificationism began to seem less like a technical stance about which sentences make sense and more like an ethical stance about what we owe to each other: which includes explanations, rather than mystifications of the commitments of others wrapped up in unevaluable language. That commitment that could well start by explai

Philosophy begins, and in my view must end, as an attempt to answer real questions asked by real people.

• Philosophy sees agency as the capacity to act intentionally and rationally to bring about change in the world.


• Psychology views agency as a person’s capacity to exert control over their environment and experience a sense of ownership over their actions.


• Sociology understands age

The pair then pressed on with their logic, pointing out that it challenged the conventional view that a person’s mind exists within their brain, and nowhere else. It would challenge it still further, if they could show externalism to apply not just to our thought processes but also to our beliefs – understood in the wide, philosophical sense: what

we want to get him in a position to sincerely assert a Moore sentence. The sentence that expresses the content of a refutation is not “p and not p” but “p, but I don’t believe it” (or “not p, but I believe it”).