The headmaster of my grammar school was T.A. ‘Taffy’ Evans. He’d been appointed to Worthing High School for Boys in 1958 – I became a pupil in 1961 – and departed in 1968 – the year I too left for university studies – to become headmaster of Steyning Grammar School. He was one of the… Read More »
I spent many years as an internal examiner when it was routine to submit one’s exam papers to an external examiner for approval and a ratification of sorts. Does this still happen as a matter of course? Anyway I quite quickly became protective of my questions, of their substance and the way they were worded.… Read More »
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) was key thinker in the Anglo-Saxon analytic tradition. It has become common practice to differentiate between the early Wittgenstein of ‘Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus’, published in 1921, and the later Wittgenstein of ‘Philosophical Investigations’ published posthumously in 1953. This underplays a degree of continuity but certainly encapsulates a decisive shift in his thinking. He… Read More »
Another quick blog addressed to sociologists. It raises a couple of issues, hypotheses of sorts. The first suggests that for all many of us are committed to the view that society is an ‘open system’ – that is, a system within which beneath-the-surface structures and causal mechanisms generate on-the-surface events without necessarily leading to neat… Read More »
When I attended the celebration of Mike Bury’s career and writings last Thursday (3/9/26), there was much discussion of the concept of ‘frailty’. Dictionary definitions refer to physical weakness or a loss of bodily resilience that makes a person vulnerable to sudden health declines from minor stresses. It is of course associated most readily with… Read More »
This is my third blog on Branko Milanovic’s ‘The Global Transformation’, which suggests I’m both enjoying reading it and finding doing so challenging and rewarding. My first comments have to do with his claim that we have entered what he calls a new era of national market liberalism. In four areas, he contends, there is… Read More »
It was a great pleasure today to attend and speak at a meeting in Senate House in London to celebrate the career and writings of Mike Bury. Not least of the day’s pleasures was reacquainting with numerous old friends and colleagues. Many of the old London medical school group: David Armstrong, Judy Green, Charlotte Humphrey,… Read More »
My last blog addressed Branko Milanovic’s evidence-based statement that the ruling class in countries like the USA has taken on a new look – a fusion of the professional-managerial class and the top capitalists (see his ‘The Great Global Transformation’). In this second effort to draw on Milanovic’s thesis, I sketch his analysis of the… Read More »
This blog draws on Branko Milanovic’s new book entitled ‘The Great Global Transformation’, an impressive volume that offers an evidence-based assessment of the present state of geopolitics. My immediate focus in on his concept of ‘homoploutia’. This is his way of articulating the emergence of a new ruling class in ‘the new capitalism’. He notes… Read More »
Like Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) was a catalyst, a take-off point for many divergent thinkers. Left-Hegelians diverged one way, Right-Hegelians another. There is no one reading of Hegel. Nor can his considerable body of work be captured in a mere blog. I will do the best I can. Hegel charged himself with replacing… Read More »