The original Python sketch is the stuff of comedy legend. But why put on a tribute to it nearly 40 years later? I asked the organiser, Peter Worley. His idea of the match was as a profile raiser for his “fourth R” campaign, which promotes reasoning as a basic skill that should be taught alongside reading, writing and arithmetic. How better to do that, he thought, than by restaging the Python football match?

The whole endeavour of the consciousness studies community is absurd – they are in pursuit of a chimera. They misunderstand the nature of consciousness. The conception of consciousness which they have is incoherent. The questions they are asking don’t make sense. They have to go back to the drawing board and start all over again. It’s literally a total waste of time.

In the course of my research, the texts of Plato were manipulated by a word processor to restore them to their classical format. They were regimented again into uniform columns of Homeric lines. Punctuation and spaces were expunged. As if travelling back in time, I was perhaps the first since Hellenistic times to see the dialogues as they left Plato’s hand.

Those of us contemplating jetting off to a philosophy conference abroad really do need to ask ourselves how much good we would really be doing by going and whether we can justify the harm that we are certainly responsible for if we go.

Those who vote intelligently vote for principles as much as they do for policy. The problem is that bodies of principle tend to be incompatible with each other. In fact, they normally conflict, head-on. Conservatism and socialism are two obvious examples here. My point, therefore, is that, with this type of incompatibility, it is difficult to see how any coalition could be maintained for long without a considerable sacrifice of principle – not to say integrity – by at least one of the parties to it.

The government claims that the important decisions it is now making are guided by principles that simply cannot be guiding them. Their decisions must in fact be guided by other considerations. Yet they prefer to peddle nonsense than to reveal their actual thinking (assuming there is some). Why? Why do politicians, who are experts in rhetoric and seek to win public favour, relentlessly and publicly indulge in shoddy reasoning?

Evidence Based Medicine is a thesis about reasoning: it champions a certain way of thinking about practice, one based not on the particular, not on thecontext-specific, but on broad statistical concerns. It emphasises “the increasing realisation of the power of probabilistic reasoning” to establish “a new epidemiologic standard”. So the claims of the “EBMers” imply a whole position in medical epistemology. But authors seem unwilling to give a detailed exposition, let alone defence of this position to critics. Hence the accusations of arrogance.

I was prompted to write a book by re-reading Republic, Leviathan, and The Communist Manifesto for the first time in half a century and wondering how well they would stand up in the light of what present-day sociologists can fairly claim to know that Plato, Hobbes, and Marx did not. None of them were doing social science as that term is nowadays understood. But all three advance conclusions derived from evidence for how human beings do, or would, or might, behave under different environmental and historical conditions. If these arguments are bad ones, this will presumably undermine the larger purposes which the three texts are intended to serve. Or will it?

Logic as a subject has existed for a long time. Aristotle and the Stoics identified some of its principles, as did Indian logicians. And this ancient logic underwent an extraordinary mathematical development in the last hundred and fifty years. So logic certainly exists, at least as a branch of mathematics. The question is whether it is anything more than that.

Becoming knowledgeable about good arguments through arguing, through focused involvement and educational progress through stages of deepeningunderstanding, is a logically prior requirement to being able to give a set of criteria or a definition of a good argument. So rather than seek a definition or criteria, we should seek expertise, wisdom regarding what we were tempted to define, through the long, slow and gradually deepening involvement in thinking things through.