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Letters

Letters to the Editor

More Things in Heaven and Earth? • Logic Chopping? • Eat More Meat! • Cannibals’ Corner • Collective Indignation • Car Mania

More Things in Heaven and Earth?

Dear Sir,

In your last issue, I was struck by the close parallels between the ideas in your first article, Peter Lloyd’s ‘The Physical World is a Fiction’, and those in Martin Tyrrell’s ‘Here I Go, Here I Go, Here I Go’. To disprove the existence of the physical world costs Peter Lloyd no more trouble than it costs Martin Tyrrell to disprove the existence of nations, and much the same technique is used by both of them.

Getting caught up with enthusiasm for this philosophical method, I soon found I could likewise disprove the existence of the Liberal Democrat Party, the Church of England, the Monarchy, Oxford and Cambridge Universities, the Papacy, and the Inland Revenue, the United Nations, NATO, and the Boy Scout Movement. All these things have a complexity extending along the time dimension as well as in space, together with a multitude of more or less invisible relationships, which absolutely precludes any of them ever being a sense-datum.

On cooler reflection, however, I began to suspect that this mass destruction had been achieved a little too easily.

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