Author Archives: Rafe

Hans-Hermann Hoppe has a video on praxeology. If you are familiar with the line of argument there is no need to sit through it again as he goes through the routine at a nice slow pace. If you are not familiar with the … Continue reading →

One of the often-repeated arguments against the theory of conjectural knowledge can be called the argument from technology. Mises: “The popular prestige that the natural sciences enjoy in our civilization is, of course, not founded upon the merely negative condition … Continue reading →

Interesting exchange on a blog the other day. An economist took exception to a disparaging comment that I passed on the positivists and logical empiricists and he implied that Popper was himself a positivist. He defended Kuhn against my put down, … Continue reading →

A wonderful series of lectures endowed by a remarkable inventor, entrepreneur (and philosopher). In 1927 in his mother’s basement, Obert Tanner began an industrial enterprise that has become the largest firm of its kind in the United States. The O.C. … Continue reading →

That is the authoritarian structure of western thought. With compliments to David Miller and the late Bill Bartley who have been the most active exponents of non-justificationism. The immediate purpose of this post is to think aloud about re-writing a … Continue reading →

Jenny Teichman and Katherine Evans, Philosophy: A Beginner’s Guide, (second edition), Blackwell, Oxford, 1995. First edition 1991. The book was written for a general readership and university freshers, aiming to present the major topics in self-contained chapters without using technical jargon. The … Continue reading →

This is the full list of reports on a recent trip to Israel with a group of people from the Australian Council of Christians and Jews. I happen to have a friend on the Council and he showed me the … Continue reading →

Simon Blackburn, The Big Questions: Philosophy, Quercus, London,2009. In the chapter What Do We Know? Virtual realities and reliable authorities. One of the most influential views of our situation as theorists is that of Karl Popper, famous for his deliniation of … Continue reading →

I have  been perplexed over the years by the number of times that I have read and heard views attributed to Popper which don’t sound quite the same as the ideas of the man himself,  at least as I understood … Continue reading →

But this is very strange. For what would be the point of our testing our hypotheses at all if they earned no greater credibility by passing the tests? It is not  just a matter of our abiding by the rules … Continue reading →