Philosophy Thoughts as and when

  In July this year, 2025, I graduated from the Institute of Physics (Publishing branch) Peer Review Excellence programme. They aim for the very highest scholarly standard of communication across books, journals, science news and media, as well as conference proceedings.  Rigour and integrity is their motto. The programme is aimed at young early career physical science researchers with PhDs in the sciences (Physics, Chemistry, Astronomy, Earth Sciences), trying to hone their skills to a high standard in peer reviewing. It gives you reviewer competency, and a standardized quality of peer reviewing in order to become a trusted, ethical, sensitive, constructive and confident reviewer with an awareness of the problem of bias. The programme also gives you valuable experience points. Here's the beautiful certificate and badge they gave me after I passed all their assessment tests with flying colours. The tests were taken from heavy going Physics research and real examples of scienti...

In my previous post, it may seem as though my BA Dissertation supervisor, Professor Anthony Price managed to sustain an ethos of "courteous formality" at all times while I was a student. The unsuspecting reader may assume he was only prone to random fits that impacted on my academic work and more after I had graduated, around the time I was gathering referees. Not so. He was generally a fitful person, whether in lectures (claiming he would storm out of the lecture theatre and not return if a certain group of students wouldn't immediately settle down {no I wasn't one of these noiser students}); supervisions (such as his fitful insistence that empathy is never referred to as an emotion in that edition of Hume's text) and tutorials (as I shall explain in this post).  I didn't take it seriously as a student, you just learn to weather his melodramatic fits. So I dismissed it at the time as irrelevant to my studies and academic work. Especially since neither he, nor...

We cannot rewrite history. The following selection of emails shows clearly that Professor Anthony W Price was my undergraduate supervisor from start (July 2012 consultation) to finish (March 2013, 2nd/final supervision) and nobody else gave me any input.  As you can see, Professor A W Price and I got on famously during the degree. And he never even mentioned Plato once during supervisions!  However, he seemed, inexplicably, to 'go off the boil' after I graduated (see my example at end of this blog post), leaving me without any support or references from someone who had both supervised my research thesis and been one of only 4 lecturers who were my tutorial tutors / markers in my final year.  A W Price conducted and marked my 2nd term tutorials for the History of Philosophy {Ancient Philosophy, focusing on Aristotle}   The other three markers were: Michael Garnett (Political Philosophy, 2nd term) Sarah Patterson (History of Philosophy {Early Modern} 1st term) Chr...

Today I'm springing off from a strange article about psychiatry and the Philosophy of Madness, posted on TPM's Facebook....Long-winded too! You can read it  here .  Foucault is probably the best at discussing this subject matter. I'm reading an exciting book about him at the moment. I've already read one of Foucault's texts before looking at secondary literature. That way I can be more critical of any secondary literature I come across. I avoid reading secondary literature before reading the original text. My mother taught me that. She was taught at school to always read original texts before reading literary criticism. As for Philosophy of Psychiatry? Really? Philosophy of Psychology, yes, that came up at uni but I didn't take that option. I went for Politics, Ethics, & Aesthetics, as options. History of Philosophy and Ep and Met were compulsory final year level core modules, anyway. So they were never up as an option. Hence, I've stayed within the Hist...

Updated 19th April 2025:  NB: Clearly people have not understood this section below on mentorship. 🙄 So I'll explain it a bit further. Just as Sue and I are mutually in love with each other so we have a mutual mentorship model. Yes it's a thing. It's not unusual. And indeed any Professor of Leadership worth their salt will confirm that this model is a very good one and works splendidly. We use it and it works for us. We both have a lot to offer each other. In academia, there's what some male Professors call 'camps', other male researchers term 'factions'. These may be a group of people who adhere to a particular academic, or it may be an individual who adheres to one particular academic because that person can connect with that academic as a person and can identify with their Philosophy and so wish to advocate their philosophy as well as develop themselves along their lines.  I am, and always have only been, since early 2010, an academic adherent of Pr...

Further to my previous post: 8 years ago today, to the date, I posted this 👇 regarding my undergraduate dissertation (BA (Hons) Philosophy). So why do I need to keep repeating myself?