Articles and press

The Independent has set up a nice page for me including a few classic ethics pieces and some of my recent recent 'food musings'.

And the London Times Higher recently allowed me to review in depth a very unusual book called ‘Food Routes’, which enthuses about how new technology will change not only the way we grow food and transport it to market – but how we eat too. (You will need to login though to read it.) Other recent Times Higher reviews are here.

However, for true afficienados or seekers of Cohen pearls of wisdom (or whatever), Muck Rack guards a fairly comprehensive recent selection.

Actually, I've been writing articles for so long, most of it is before the internet! Imagine that!

Rethinking Thinking

By Martin Cohen I’ve been thinking lot about thinking a lot! This book is pretty much a summary of my thoughts over thirty years… Tip One , via Sun Tzu’s classic text, The Art of War , is don’t do things the clever way, nor even the smart way: do them the easy way. Because it doesn’t matter what you’re wondering about, or researching or doing - someone else has probably solved the problem for you already. Google it, get the book, find the answer. Tip Two is to avoid ‘black and white’ thinking, binary distinctions, ‘yes/no’ language and questions, and instead take the tip from ‘design thinking’ that approaches rooted in notions of questions and answers are themselves limiting insight and that it is sometimes better to go for narratives. Tip Three , which, yes, is connected to the previous tips, and that’s a good thing too, is to look for the pattern in the data. However, there’s a caution that has to come with advice to pattern match, because as we become at...

Chewing over FOOD!

Readers who know my strong slant towards FRUIT AND VEG in I Think Therefore I Eat, will maybe be puzzled to find me taking on the vegans recently. Nonetheless, that is where I felt the truth of the extraordinarily complex food arguments lies and philosophy takes us where the truth is whether we like it or not! The Observer (London) even accused me of waging ‘culture wars’ and wondered: Is it possible that a combination of well-meaning philanthropists and large agricultural concerns have united to exploit health fears for financial gain, while neglecting the nutritional shortcomings in their recommendations? Anyway, in the event I was delighted to work with the brilliant Frédéric Leroy on this article, which basically follows up a request he received from the influential European Food Agency to raise public awareness about the complexity of food issues and the implicatons of simple ‘one size fits all’ solutions. Our piece kicked off a public information campaign which i...

Puzzling over Philosophy Problems

When it first came out way back in the last century (sighs) 101 Philosophy Problems was quite an iconoclast. Up to then, the most radical book of philosophy was Bertrand’s Problems of Philosophy , and that book splits the problems into boring categories like logic and epistemology ... So I knew, as a young(ish) philosophy teacher, there was room for a new look at the subject, and 101 PP was it. In time it went on to sell (I think) about 250 000 copies in about 20 languages. I don’t know for sure as the publisher, Routledge, seemed to think it was a bit vulgar to keep track of things such as sales figures, although they gave me a nice lunch in London! Here's a taste of the book, a problem that up to then had been summed up as a landmark philosophical problem concerning our understanding of descriptive knowledge situated somewhere the field of epistemology ... but I reinvented as simply the Problem of the Cow in the Field: Farmer Field is concerned about his pri...

Martin Cohen Writer and philosopher

Search This Blog