Tom Morris: 2009-10-19

2009.10.19

Margate, Kent, England David Mitchell (of Peep Show, That Mitchell and Webb Look and the "PC" character from the UK Get a Mac ads) is arguing against the REF: Nothing good ever got invented by accident, apart from some silly fun stuff like the slinky, post-it notes, penicillin, warfarin and X-rays. Reading it brought back to mind that oaf Charles Clarke's statement that medieval history and other purely academic research was a bit dodgy... there is no reason for the state to pay for them. That's Charles Clarke with the maths and economics degree from King's College, Cambridge. Universities are fine for training government ministers, remember, but not for you and me. And research departments are fine so long as they produce something that can be packaged up and sold, but not if they waste time discovering interesting stuff about nature or humanity. 2009-10-19T15:00:43Z

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Tom Morris tom@tommorris.org

Currently in: Kent, England

Usually in: East Sussex, England

I am a vegetarian, an atheist, like to code in Ruby and Scala (and Java, but let’s not talk about that), and noodle about with microformats and the Semantic Web.

I have an MA in philosophy from Heythrop College, University of London. My philosophical interests are in analytic metaphysics, ontology, modality, the work of Armstrong, Lewis, Kripke, Russell and Plato. I have a strange, unfulfilled interest in Gadamer’s hermeneutics. I’ve been influenced by Gadamer, by Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Rawls and Nozick.

Musically, I like jazz fusion, soul and P-Funk. My musical nirvana would be a mixture of Beethoven, Miles Davis and George Clinton topped with a side-serving of Erykah, Jill and Angie.

I also write for the Citizendium, an online encyclopedia project. If you know about stuff, you should join in. I occasionally produce audio recordings for The Pod Delusion.

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