So which comes first? The study of the assumptions underpinning our understanding of our existence, or the study of our understanding of the assumptions underpinning our existence? I started to think about these things from the viewpoint of philosophy of science, through Neurath and Carnap, Ayer and Popper, Kuhn and Feyerabend. After much, though probably not enough, consideration, I thought that I should put the horse before the cart and consider metaphysics. After all, whether personal revelation is properly based evidence for belief is a metaphysical proposition, is it not? So I read what I could find about metaphysics. And it left me with the belief that metaphysics is no more than the selection of axioms. Personally I have the Humean passion to make my metaphysical axioms coherent, to know that reality is one jigsaw, even if I cannot sort all of the pieces. So I sift and sort my beliefs and try to make them all coherent, and , by and large, I succeed. I look at the ideas of Melanie Phillips and Michael Gove and laugh, because they cannot see the absurdity of their exclusionary rules in the context of their professed humanitarianism. But I always come up against the final hurdle of the metaphysical materialist - determinism and free will. Let there be no pretense, if there is any good argument for dualism then the dualist can see us off, and if there is no such argument we are left with the quandary. Personally I am happy with a determinism so complex that we should regard it as a mystery, and a metaphysics so nebulous that we should regard it as a luxury.
