Dear Steve,

    I found the linked Quadrant article in your last very useful in clarifying your position.

    Here is my very personal reaction, no doubt it will dismay some, as I paint on a even broader canvas.

    Aristotle clearly implied there are two sorts of people – those who thought money was a thing, and those who thought it an idea.  I read this as part of a very profound dichotomy, re-incarnate in modern times in the gulf between Russell’s  scientific take (on probability and all else) in contrast to his pupil Keynes anti-scientific attitudes (on probability and all else).  Carabelli wrote interestingly on the latter.  

    In 1620, exactly 400 years back, Francis Bacon gave Anglicanism a new central reason d’etre – Empiricism, spawning a tradition that famously took in Locke, Berkeley, Hume, I would add, Mill and Russell.  I sadly report that that tradition seems to me to be near dead today in Britain.   And Keynes seems to me to be the man who wielded the knife – through patronage and mentoring - biography clearly yields the chain Keynes, Wittgenstein, Anscombe, Feyerabend, with an end position which Feyerabend himself called “Farewell to Reason”.

    Sitting in England and reading Armstrong, Stove, Windschuttle and yourself, I am left thinking that our best hope of a successful rearguard action lies on your side of the globe.

    Rob Tye, York, UK