Richard Allen

Who is Derek Parfit?

2009-02-16T10:18:00.007Z

Philosophers such as Derek Parfit, and Hume and Blain before him, who maintain that we are not continuing persons but successive series of states, do not apply their theories to real life and especially themselves. As Bradley asked of Blain, 'Mr Blain collects that the mind is a collection. Has he ever collected who collects Mr Blain?' (But then Bradley went on to argue something rather similar in Appearance and Reality .)
Parfit explicitly states we are not the same persons at all as we were in the past. So, if you were to borrow £50 pounds for a month from him today and he asked for its repayment a month later, you could ask, 'Why?' For, according to his own doctrine, you would not then be the person who borrowed it nor he the person who lent it.
Philosophy was once the search for wisdom. But now it is often the production of absurdities that the producers themselves clearly do not believe. Why, taxpayers might well ask, do we pay good salaries to such people?

My Latest Book

2009-02-10T19:55:00.005Z

My latest book is The Necessity of God (Transaction Publishers, Rutgers (NJ USA), 2008; ISBN 978-1-4128-0832-3, 98 pp.). In it I show how previous versions of the Ontological Argument, from St Anselm to Charles Hartshorne and Keith Ward, are ambiguous between merely defining God into existence (by saying that he exists necessarily and so must exist) and proving that necessary being necessarily exists. For the active ingredient in these proofs is the idea of necessary being, and the proofs are valid only if 'God' means 'necessary being' and no more.

The latter result looks like a mere tautology: that if X is a necessary being then X necessarily exist. But it has a profound meaning: that the category or modality of necessary being is necessarily instantiated (i.e. something or other must exist, about which we so far know no more), just as that of merely possible being may or may be instantiated, and that of impossible being cannot be instantiated. This is the only valid form of the argument.

I then continue in a purely a priori manner to prove that it must be one and eternal, have all its properties necessarily, be transfinite, personal, the archetype of personal and moral existence and at least 2 in 1, the archetype of community: in short God as in classical theism. The final chapters prove, also in an a priori manner that God and the world are related as Creator and created, and that changes in the world and the unforeseeable decisions and actions of finite beings with some degree of self-determination do not mean that God is in any way temporal, limited or contingent. He necessarily knows when it happens all that does happen, and remains the same through all the changes of of detail in his activity in respect of the world.

Mistakes about inflation

2009-01-18T15:36:00.001Z

We are in the mess that we are are in today because of 2 connected reasons: Gordon Brown's binge spending, binge taxing and binge borrowing over the last 10 years; and the failure to control inflation which has made him able to carry on like that--a policy which he wants to continue in order to get us out of the situation in which it has landed us!
But, you say, inflation has been controlled! It has been kept to a little more than 2% until very recently.

Oh, no it hasn't! (It's that time of year.) What has been kept down to that level is Mr Brown's preferred CPI (a cost-of-living index), the one favoured by the EU, instead of the old RPI, which has been consistently higher. And what both of them record is merely a basket of typical household purchases and other outgoings. They are both signs of inflation, not inflation itself, though even leading commentators (such as Roger Bootle in the Telegraph), constantly refer to them as 'inflation' as if the thermometer were the temperature.

Inflation, let me remind you, is an increase in the supply of money greater than an increase in the supply of goods and services. Gordon Brown's policy of spend-a-lot, tax-a-lot and borrow even more, had inflated the money supply by much more than the 2-4% shown in the cost-of-living indices. The increases in asset prices as have been shown in the FT index and in house prices showed that the money supply had greatly increased beyond that of goods and services. Otherwise increases in some ranges of prices would have been matched by decreases in others. Yes, the prices of computers and other electronics and 'white goods' have fallen, but those of everything else have risen.