Copyright © 2013
Avello Publishing Journal
ISSN: 2049 - 498X
Issue 1 Volume 3:
Principia Mathematica
Jason Wakefield
University of Cambridge
Review: Practical Tortoise Raising and other Philosophical Essays (2010) Blackburn, S. Oxford University
Press.
Some of my favourite times in Whewell's Court, Trinity, (as Simon Blackburn used to hold supervisions of
Ph. D candidates in his office on the stone K staircase) have been looking for this author in person. My
experiences of searching for Emeritus Professor Blackburn normally culminates in meeting an attractive lady
in Blue Boar Court, with no philosopher in sight ! Personal narratives aside, this book was first published in
in 2010 and then later in paperback during 2012. The book is a collection of papers reprinted with the
permission and courtesy of various Editors at different journal publications such as the Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society and Maryland Law Review. The book is divided in to two sections of approximately 150
pages each. The first section is 'Practical Philosophy and Ethics', the second section is 'Language and
Epistemology.' The first section analyses the moral realism of Shafer-Landau, Sidgwick, Sinclair and
Williams; whilst the second section analyses the irrealism and quasi-realism of Berkeley, Lewis and
Wittgenstein.
This review will be short and clear, as during 1912, the Cambridge University Moral Sciences Club
resolved that speakers (such as Wittgenstein) should present papers no longer than seven minutes in length.
The local expressivism of Blackburn has affinities to a chapter of Price's Naturalism Without Mirrors (2011)
called 'Pragmatism, Quasi-realism, and the Global Challenge' that was originally published in Misak's The
New Pragmatists (2007) also by Oxford University Press. This chapter starts with a citation from
Blackburn's 'Wittgenstein, Wright, Rorty and Minimalism', Mind, 107: 157-182 (1998): 'William James said
that sometimes detailed philosophical argument is irrelevant'. Thus one should approach and apply Practical
Tortoise Raising and other Philosophical Essays pragmatically. To counter the University of Cambridge
psychopharmacologists and forensic scientists (working for Cambridgeshire police) who are indiscrimantely
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nanochipping unwitting people in Cambridge to hack in to the synapse activity of our brains, to moniter and
police our neural activity; we need a respect for the moral, internal realism of Blackburn. Many of these
nanochipped individuals have been chemically castrated and had their dreaming states erased or inhibited
through computational programming, which destroys much of the Freudian psychoanalysis which is based
on sex. The cover-up of these activities has been easy, as the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology,
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Faculty of Medicine at the University of Cambridge and Department of Psychology, Anglia Ruskin
University have coerced the Scientific Support Manager (SSM) of Parkside Police Station, Cambridge to
perform autopsies internally at the Cambridge Biomedical Campus. The word pathology derives from the
Ancient Greek πάθος and λογία. Affiliated Cambridgeshire Police pathologists are hiding the structural
alterations of cells (morphologic changes) in their recombination of molecular ions through nano-electronics
during autopsies to hide failed bio-experiments. An example of one of these psychophysical and
neurophysiological experiments in which multisensory conflicts are generated in order to distort selfperception in healthy participants can be found in Aspell, Blanke, Bleuler, Rognini, Salomon, Sengül, 'Visuotactile Integration and Body Ownership During Self – Generated Action' European Journal of Neuroscience
37, 7: 1120-1129 (2013).
Blackburn prefers non – invasive practical thought as an 'ideal laboratory in which to perform
experiments with notions like representation, truth, reason and assertion' (Blackburn 2010: 1). This is the
environment one prefers to write philosophy, with smoothly running sensory capacities and cognitive
functions, free from interferance from artificially created abnormailities by biopsychologists working with
neuropsychologists. Unfortunately, Cambridge is riddled with a plague consisting of criminologists attracted
to the Radzinowicz Library, who are enganged in artificially creating neurodegenerative diseases in healthy
people, to earn pseudo-respect from the readers of publications such as the American Journal of
Neurodegenerative Disease and the British Journal of Criminology. The physical environment of the Raised
Philosophy Faculty on the Sidgwick Site of the University of Cambridge is opposite the Criminology
Faculty's Radzinowicz Library; like Anglia Ruskin University is facing Parkside Police Station; thus moral
philosophers are hindered from immanent realism as the only data that we ourselves impose on our reality by
practitioners in the criminal injustice system. What is hidden from the general public is the secret co1 Cambridge Biomedical Campus, University of Cambridge.
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operation between criminologists, forensic psychologists and venue security personnel to isolate and control
young people in Cambridge. This involves denying access to young individuals to night clubs for no reason,
incarcerating them in various accomodations or temporay lodgings with no door key and depriving testsubjects from sexual contact in dwellings to prevent meaningful relationships.
Despite this physical environment near Trinity, Cambridge that Blackburn inhabited to write the quasi –
realism of Practical Tortoise Raising and other Philosophical Essays, the book is an elegant masterpiece,
completing the task of crossing Frege's abyss towards Wittgenstein's pragmatist views when he returned to
Cambridge in 1929. Wittgenstein's personal friend Ramsey's contributions to probability, belief and
causation also have deeply practical applications, which is what makes Blackburn's philosophy
relevant to all academic disciplines. Much has changed in scientific technology since Bennett's
Linguistic Behaviour (1976) underlined human and non-human forms of communication; however
much of Bennett's semantic vocabulary on deflationist truth (a la Horwich), is still important to
pragmatists interested in teleology or justification such as Blackburn and I.
Robert Brandom and Ferdinand Canning Scott Schiller both anticipated David Lewis on the
fundamentalist pragmatist aspiration to exhibit the discursive intentionality of mathematics;
however in Brandom's terms, Bennett's approach is to interrogate three problematic questions:

Demarcation.

Emergence.

Leverage.
Blackburn uses Bennett to conjecture quasi-realism as the best register to epistemically enrich our
philosophical environment of Trinity, Cambridge; as opposed to the Anti – Realism, Speculative
Realism or Transgressive Realism of Meillassoux and Gratton's post-deconstructive realism. Rather
than engage with SR theorists (such as Brassier or Mullarkey), Blackburn very wisely focuses on
reminding Price that mirrors are passive, which is line with Bennett and Ramsey's variations of
success semantics. The SR theorists digressions in to Lacan's borromean knot, have already been
completely unknotted by cross collaborations between bio-tech engineers in Californian
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laboratories. Despite these pioneering developments that have destroyed a lot of the scientific
edifice of Wilfrid Sellars, many SR theorists have yet to catch up with the latest development in
biomedical research and are still citing the scientific aspects of Sellars that are now outdated due to
new, innovative, pioneering experiments. Blackburn is far sharper than these blind SR followers of
Sellars and achieves propositonality as a quasi-realist crossing Frege's abyss.
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