Imagine a psychological experiment. You set up a “shop” where the people taking part in the experiment have to purchase a washing power from a choice of 12 available. They have to pay for the washing power with their own money, but they get to keep it...
When I started this blog two years ago, I was planning to write about Wittgenstein; I am not sure what aspects of Wittgenstein I planned to write about, but in the years before starting the blog I had not spent much time thinking about philosophy, so the blog was part...
Wittgenstein often emphasised the difference between his way of doing philosophy and traditional approaches – indeed, he sometimes suggests that what he does should be seen as a successor activity to philosophy. Partly, this is about giving up a certain kind of...
In a typically provocative move, Freud called the book that forged his reputation “The Interpretation of Dreams”. He presents the book as a contribution to science – it is an attempt to show that a set of apparently random and meaningless mental...
Last night I had a dream. It was hard to understand and yet seemed full of significance and I wanted to tell other people about it and try to work out what it meant. This sort of experience raises various questions – the most obvious are: “what caused my dream?”...
