Terence Rajivan Edward

The Enlightenment philosopher David Hume’s doctrine of the imagination entails that the imagination is limited in its creativity: it can only combine (or sometimes divide) ideas derived from sensory impressions, for example combine the ideas of blue and cat to imagine a blue cat. Sketches on my Instagram feed present me with much stranger things, produced by means of machines implementing artificial intelligence, such as cat spiders, as I call them. A cat spider has the body of a spider but the head of a cat. Are these a problem for Hume? They seem consistent with the doctrine of imagination presented, but they are a challenge to his conception of the mind as proceeding by customary associations.

Professor Simon Baron-Cohen claims that males on average are better at systematizing: creating or analyzing systems, such as the physical laws of the universe or how a machine works. Females on average are better at empathizing: intuitively understanding the emotions of others and responding appropriately. But Baron-Cohen tells us that there can be males with a female brain and females with a male brain: a brain which is better at systematizing. Some personal experience of mine suggests that this is an illusion. I was intent on turning my apartment into a little literary museum from around 2019 to 2023. I leave within ten minutes walking distance of Elizabeth Gaskell's House. In any fatal competition with the distinguished heritage house, it is rational for me to cover tastes that they do not appear to appeal to: stereotypically boyish tastes in science fiction and adventure and technical matters of some literary interest. But is that my taste? Well, I am really interested in outer space, including astrophysics, but it is outside the topics I normally write on, and also in computer coding. But what does it matter? The competition incentives move me in this direction, regardless of my tastes. My worry is that what seems to be some science fiction and space adventure and computer coding loving female is not a strange creature, a woman with a male brain: her choices are simply a natural response to the competitions she is or has been involved in, quite plausibly with other females. (Maybe there are some slight differences to end up with the incentives to go in this direction. I don’t know. I happen to know lots of women interested in coding.)

In 2015, Professor Anna Alexandrova and Professor Robert Northcott published an article entitled “Prisoner’s Dilemma doesn’t explain much.” There they tell us about a large literature which seeks to apply the famous prisoner’s dilemma rational actor model to various situations, with only one clear success: explaining an RNA virus. I suspect the average economist spots a number of prisoner’s dilemma situations but does not write about them. I present one in response to the popular singer Madonna’s song “Express Yourself.” Prospective romantic partners each have two options: express yourself or do not. If both do, there are suitable conditions for a romantic relationship. If one does and the other does not, the one who does ends up with hurt feelings and experiencing inequality. If both do not, there is no such inequality but no romance either. The rational choice, given the desire to avoid the asymmetric situation, which the singer has too, is for both parties to not express themselves.

In earlier decades, there must have been people who said, "I want to join a profession associated with highly cultured people, such as philosophy or history, but I cannot be bothered doing the reading. These cultured people refer to all these literary texts and more, some of them old and some new; many of them are outside of my specialism. Is there a way of sounding cultured without the wider reading." (Was that your predecessor?) P.F. Strawson's writing style in various texts of his seems to show these people the way, to the point where I wonder about cause and effect. He sounds incredibly cultured but his references outside of philosophy are few or nothing; sometimes his references are simply nothing. (Are there any references in Freedom and Resentment? Should we be rewarding this essay so much, with the massive boom in commentary since the mid-2010s, some 2000 articles or something, or simply since the 21st century? Academic works of philosophy are not just about argument; they also for passing on knowledge of the literature. "When you are as clever as Strawson, people make an exception"?) How does he do it: sound so cultured without literary allusions and more? (i) The occasional French term: "raison d’être," etc. (ii) Saying things like "Another case regarding the topic of which we are concerned..." - what topic? I have forgotten now! He removes the helpful reminders. That is for textbooks, isn't it? Not a high-minded work such such such as this. (iii) Patient pacing of material - he must have thought of fifty points but only two elegantly appear. Etc. I suspect this analysis has been made in some Cambridge circles, hence Thomas H Smith's quite different writing. We in the provinces are catching up a little. (Strawson, like various others, sounds to me as if the 19th century did not actually end.)

What is the relationship between custom and madness? Are there only so many departures from customary thoughts or actions before which one is mad? I suspect this is so, and the suspicion converges to some extent with our psychiatric practice, which is really about reducing any deviation from normal and unadventurous behaviour. The suspicion is of interest to philosophers because, if true, each time an individual breaks with custom, this may seem rational by all standards - supported by reason and leading to valuable outcomes; however, when one examines the whole set, a line has been crossed: it is madness to have this many breaks.

I believe that in various fields (professions, specialisms), someone observes a youthful generation emerging and regards most of them, or even all, as not good enough for this field. Who has not heard these dismissals? Not talented enough, not hard working enough, maybe even not manageable enough! Beyond those who will simply try their luck and leave - regarding what they did as a youthful episode - there are those who stay for a longer period, or whose works do. But probably some leading figure is of the opinion that they too must go or their works must go, especially in the West, which is based on dynamism and radical changes of period: only the best from the previous period, if anything. “Mathematics really only began in 1910” and the like. But how to get rid of them, given our emphasis on rights and rules of respect and today’s political correctness? Here is a trick which I suspect is being employed: bring in a lot of people just before Internet use becomes widespread and they will long use referencing practices that suit a previous age and one will have an excuse for getting rid of them as simply hardworking idiots.

This essay is divided into two halves, entitled Sancho Panza and Don Quixote. In the first half, it registers the oversights of some skilled academic craftspeople, and probably a lot of other skilled craftspeople: medics, lawyers, builders, electricians, etc. While good on details, their conception of human nature leaves them puzzled about the big picture. I note an example beyond multicultural cities, concerning Italy. In the second half, I register other people, who offer armchair speculations but ignore details. I respond once again to the question of whether lectures are obsolete in the age of the Internet, because all the information in lecturers are online. In 2022, I pointed out that the lecturer sometimes has information from various sources in a document which provides a neat summary; the information is inconveniently scattered on the Internet (if all of it is even online - I shall assume it is). Can search engines with artificial intelligence summaries overcome this problem? It is a neat argument - all the information is online, so lectures are obsolete - but it fits poorly with my actual experience of the Internet, of search engines and more. Nevertheless, I make a neat armchair prediction about authentic Chinese food in China.

Pierre Bourdieu proposes that irrelevant stylistic factors play a role in who progresses in various careers, various fields. “You may be as good a researcher as me, or better, but I progress, because I have an elegant style, say. How to do this cannot be captured in rules, for you to learn, unfortunately, and usually requires upbringing in a privileged social class” - that is a Bourdieusian way of thinking. Situationalism is a theory from psychology which denies that there are character differences between human beings: humans are the same but behave differently because of their different situations; if you were in my situation, you would behave as I do. Situationalism poses a challenge to Bourdieu: “A style that pleases the selector simply comes if one has done more reading, say, and so selection based on stylistic factors as well is acceptable” a situationalist might argue. I consider a philosophical response to this argument.

Rousseau claims that a slavery contract is always invalid - it does not create any obligations or transfer of rights - because at least one party who agrees to it is insane. I draw attention to examples in which there is no insanity. One example concerns agreeing to a slavery contract after numerous madmen have found happiness by doing so. Another example concerns agreeing to a slavery contract with a master who is predicted to die in a few days. A third example concerns agreeing to a slavery contract to a master whose instructions are extremely vague.

When we think of why there was a British empire, we think foremostly of economic explanations - we think of raw materials gained, of foreign peoples exploited for gain, of commerce - and then of the civilizing mission: converting savages to Christianity. But were there other reasons for why people supported the empire project? This paper speculates that a few people supported the empire because they were particularists, against simple standardized systems such as the metric system, and rather like moral intuitionists and moral particularists of analytic philosophy today, such as Jonathan Dancy. “The Europeans are not particularists and we British imperialists are interested in finding fellow particularists and helping them join the modern world,” they thought.

Social anthropology is mostly associated with a method of study by those who have some acquaintance with it. The standard image of a researcher in this discipline for many of us is that of a posh white Westerner, an English gentleman or lady, living amongst an exotic faraway tribe, participating in their way of life for an extended period, and then reporting on the society: its customs, the shared worldview and ethos, the social structure, and perhaps more. This fieldwork by participation is referred to as ethnography and in the eyes of many anthropologists defines the discipline, which was once defined as the study of primitive societies. I provide an alternative account of why this definition is now offered, the standard account being that primitive societies mostly disappeared, forcing a change. Professor Tim Ingold has attacked the definition over decades, recommending a vision of social anthropology as philosophy with the people in it. In this paper, I raise a worry about the fieldwork definition - it will be a worry for some anthropologists anyway: it allows for a kind of journalism to count as anthropology, a kind which does not draw upon the specific tradition of concepts, theses, and fieldwork insights of British academic anthropology (or French anthropology or American anthropology, for that matter). An appendix considers whether this paper is analytic philosophy.

There is a famous story about the philosopher A.J. Ayer. He was at a party and there was some trouble occurring between the boxer Mike Tyson, famous for his swift knockouts of opponents, and the model Naomi Campbell. Ayer intervened. He apparently did not like Tyson's aggressive behaviour. He said that Tyson was a heavyweight champion and Ayer was an Oxford professor of logic; they were both eminent in their field and should sit down and discuss the matter rationally. It is a story that probably means to various people: this is an English gentleman. But to philosopher it may not mean that. After all, what is a gentleman? To me and probably to others, it means this: Ayer is conveyng, "I may be far from the best but I am the real thing. I am not a philosopher who stops being a philosopher at a party featuring many non-professionals in our field and switches back on in a philosophy seminar." With Ayer, his first book popularized a type of view about ethical sentences, namely emotivism: that they are not true or false, only sentences which express propositions are true or false, for example "Paris is the capital of France," rather they are like "Boo" and "Hurray." Emotivism is traced back to the American philosopher Charles Stevenson, who was at Cambridge I believe. Is Ayer is merely an astute professional, who shrewdly read the market demand, with his popular book: Language, Truth, and Logic? He is conveying, "No." (By the way, in British social anthropology, I believe Godfrey Liedhardt said that Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown, revolutionaries in field, were not gentlemen, a view more or less repeated by I.C. Jarvie.)

When we think of courage, we imagine bravery in war. But is there other courage? A beautiful, attractive woman asks you to make love to her but you refuse: do you lack courage? Let us leave this aside. Is there such a thing as courage in philosophy? A philosopher challenges you and you refuse? Are you lacking courage? This question must have first and last occurred to me when observing Derek Parfit speak. Parfit appeared to challenge me, but I didn’t take him seriously. But is that a lack of courage? I present some excuses for not taking up the challenge. But what if you have none of these? You have to accept that you lack courage then, by the local standards anyway.

I notice that quite a few philosophers die younger than I expect, given the affluent social groups they are from or connected to, such as Robert Nozick (63 years), G.A. Cohen (68 years), Bernard Williams (73 years), and Derek Parfit (74 years). Perhaps others suffer from mental health problems, beyond the quite mild problems I suffered from writing a lot in 2023, which led to quite a heavy-handed response by the NHS, I think. In this paper, I explain how to talk with a psychiatrist or mental health nurse, in a way which draws upon our skills as analytic philosophers. I refer to David Lewis when doing so, suspecting he is a bad influence!

One of the big issues which dominated British social anthropology in the 1990s was its relationship to cultural studies. Here are some standard stories of origins: cultural studies developed from applying predominantly French 1960s theoretical frameworks, developed for the study of prestigious arts, to less esteemed culture, on the grounds that they can be used there too or that there is no defensible distinction between the two. Social anthropology, older, had started out in the 19th century as the study of human societies, with a special emphasis on primitive societies, and developed a special method of lengthy intensive fieldwork and later applied this method “at home” too. Its traditional reference points are different and unsurprisingly there is rivalry, sometimes bitter. I interpret Marilyn Strathern as trying to offer an anthropology to win over students for whom cultural studies has appeal, in her 1992 book After Nature: English kinship in the late 20th century. She engages in a kind of worldview analysis of a number of things of interest to students of English culture - she grasps the intellectual tastes of the student and aims at an anthropology which works for that taste, it seems to me. My own synthesis is at a philosophical level. Building on John Searle’’s responses to Jacques Derrida, I observe positivist premises shared by this influential figure in cultural studies and the functionalist tradition which dominated British anthropology from the 1920s to the 1960s at least. These allow us to conceive a more Derridean functionalist anthropology. Also I propose that it is possible to do a number of functionalist analyses for “1990s cultural studies tastes,” as Strathern does worldview analyses.

This paper responds to the popular singer Madonna’s attempt at stand up comedy, or one of her attempts at least. The audiences for comedy, in my experience, are mostly young people - 20 somethings or early 30 somethings - and Madonna is surely an expert at winning over such audiences, but her comedy seems suited for older audiences with more experience of life. Strange for someone with a reputation for business shrewdness: I present this as a dilemma. After addressing it, I introduce the suspicion that under the pressures of the comedian system (hostile audiences), Madonna will feel disposed to move towards more one liners - brief jokes - but this makes it hard to allow her to share her rich vat of experiences in comedic form: a project surely of artistic value. On the other hand, by doing one liners she stands more chance of amusing diverse audiences and she stands greater chance of social justice: we can track new one liners, given what we know and give her credit as a comedic craftswoman.

P.F. Strawson claimed not to understand the debate between hard determinists, compatibilists, and indeterminists, in his much cited essay “Freedom and Resentment”. Strawson’s belief was that we have two ways of responding to people, and these two ways are simply part of our human nature: we have reactive attitudes which treat people as responsible subjects and we have objective attitudes, which regard people as if their actions are caused by forces beyond their control, for example when dealing with a schizophrenic. This paper raises a question: is the wider world, or are portions of it, in favour of revising what Strawson believes to be fixed? Every time you treat someone as responsible in a less than pleasant way, for example get angry with them, you should instead regard them as suffering from some disorder which prevents acceptable behaviour, or acceptable to you. Objective attitudes instead apparently!

This paper considers the proposal that the best way in which philosophers can contribute to philosophy for future generations is to digitize texts from yesteryear which are not currently available online. I guess some philosophers will recoil from this proposal either on the grounds that they are too posh for this “slave labour” or else because with their intellectual abilities, you cannot reasonably expect them to do this. Anyway, I propose that from our current moral-political philosophy frameworks, both intuitionism and utilitarianism can defend roughly the current system.

A dominant school within Victorian social anthropology was evolutionism, represented to the general public by the cloistered but ever enchanting Cambridge professor Sir James Frazer, whom WIttgenstein and R.G. Collingwood responded to, amongst philosophers. Evolutionism said that societies go through a sequence of stages, but some societies are at an earlier stage still. Of course, Frazer’s time is long past and he is often not even taught in social anthropology, since he did not do fieldwork: which defines the research identity of the average anthropologist. But is Frazer still difficult for most of us to avoid? One sometimes “dates” other communities by when they have solved a given problem. In philosophy, do you have helpful rules for detecting paradoxes - more scientific - or do you rely on the magic of intuition still? In computer games, you have made a pretty game but can you do 3 dimensional graphics yet?

Various online sites enable users to like this or that by pressing a button: to like a philosophy paper, to like a video, to like a picture, messages, and more. Doctor Lucy McDonald rejects the view that an online “like” means “I like this” or is an expression of a positive emotion. She develops an account based on what she judges to be the social function of giving likes: to initiate or maintain a social bond with someone who has uploaded something onto the Internet or left some message. I report how I use “likes” on Instagram, in case anyone is interested. Instagram allows me to check my activity, including wherever I have placed “likes,” so I use giving likes on videos, by means of a heart symbol, to record anything worth remembering.

Libertarian Robert Nozick, on my reading, responds to Bernard Williams by saying that if Williams thinks the way we should distribute medical goods is based on medical need, he is analogously committed to the distribution of haircuts based on need. As I read him, Nozick wonders why other aims to do with haircuts matter less for Williams than the “proper aim” of getting a haircut: can’t a barber set up a business because he likes conversation with a variety of people and give haircuts according to whom he likes conservations with? I argue that a socially just attempt to distribute opportunities for haircuts will have to take into account other aims of a haircut than reducing inconveniently long hair. Haircuts have social functions, including subtly signalling sexuality. More subtle signals may be important in imperfectly liberal societies. This paper challenges an assumption which may be widespread on this database (or maybe not - I am the last one disposed to make it?): one assumes that a Williamsian approach applied to haircuts is all about preventing inconveniently long hair.

I open with a contrast between the Searle-Derrida debate and British social anthropology’s opposition to cultural studies. My paper features an attempt at synthesis between the rival camps in the latter debate, which will be its most important material for some readers. Then I turn to someone much studied by Cultural Studies, it seems. Madonna has done stand-up comedy on The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon. I have done some stand-up comedy myself. I think Madonna has used a rational strategy: around 2 minutes in she says, “Please don’t pull me off, I have jokes.” In a gong show, a type of comedy show, audience members have the power to get rid of a comedian before their maximum allocated time is up, e.g. 5 minutes. Audiences at some gong shows are told to give comedians a minute or two to settle in, rather than making an instant assessment. So she takes risks earlier and around 2 minutes Madonna goes for heavy-hitting moves to keep the audience on side: in her case, discussion of the paintings she owns. I have never used this strategy myself, although I asked a fellow comedian and he told me “Just do your best stuff from the start.” That is good advice for me.

This paper responds to Doctor David Builes’s paper which appeared in the PhilPapers new manuscripts section today: “A Dilemma for Plenitude.” I find what is called the scene setting of the paper puzzling. Consider the view (or claim or thesis) that if a lump has been sculpted into a statue, there are now two things in one place: a lump and a statue. Builes describes this view as narrow (presumably because it is only about a lump and a statue, amongst the many things in this world), so it is rational to generalize if we can, but he aims to argue that the only rational generalization is a view of reality which is too objectionable. I make what seems to me to be an obvious point: I argue that the view is significant even if narrow from a certain perspective, because it challenges the assumption that two physical objects do not occupy the same physical space. (For convenience of exposition, the paper contains an imitation of Laura Riding, which may also be of literary interest.)

As analytic philosophers or social scientists, we try to avoid merely suggestive evidence. Ideally we seek something stronger, such as proof. This is true even if we think of ourselves as not arguing against the sceptic, rather to convince someone who shares more of our premises. But to avoid suggestive evidence altogether in life would seem to leave us in the position of a person with autism. In this paper, I examine a book cover which suggested to me that Bernard Williams has the brains of Madonna: her intellectual abilities are similar - high general intelligence, high common sense - but she works in a different field, perhaps or probably because of a less privileged background. I speculatively propose that Madonna’s brains have been affected by epistemic injustice and her brains are now more similar to mine.

I opened my new book “Any Donkey Could: amusing essays on Western culture before the 20th century” with an essay on how the arts originated. In this paper, I respond to a “criticism”: this is mere common sense. I am not sure that I agree with this assessment. But I present two criticisms of it: it is unlikely that many people can give the answers I give, people who can give other commonsense reactions to other questions; and various people who seem capable of giving both answers would dismiss as unanswerable the question, because of lack of historical records. I then present a third answer, not in my book: that an artistic touch provided a way of giving evidence of surplus energy, beyond what a task strictly requires.

PhilPapers lists a number of varieties of feminism, each of which has papers under its heading. Some of these varieties are associated with familiar political philosophies: there is liberal feminism, for example, and also socialist and Marxist feminism. But what about conservative feminism? Is the very idea contradictory? I present a conservative project, which probably attracted some women in the nineteenth century and probably attracts some women hence. According to this conservative project, any institution or discipline must solve problems of strategy and men do this. Women should focus on being workers within the project.

Ever since the Jacques Derrida Cambridge degree scandal, in which several prominent analytic philosophers wrote in protest against Derrida’s receiving an honorary degree from the University of Cambridge, elite philosophy departments in the English-speaking world have been known the world over for their fraught relations with literature departments. In this paper, I propose that the literary style of senior figures in analytic philosophy is as if nineteenth century literature did not end. I quote a number of analytic philosophers throughout its history: Professor C.D. Broad, Professor Bernard Williams, Professor H.L.A. Hart, Professor Crispin Wright, and Professor Helen Beebee.

What was Oedipus’s relationship to the Sphinx? He was prophesized to have sexual relations with his mother, so he left to Thebes. It was guarded by a Sphinx, who would devour anyone who failed to solve her riddle. Do you think Oedipus thought this: I am willing to risk an attempt, because if I solve her riddle I can surely have sexual relations with her as a further reward and she is surely not my mother? The paper contains other material, concerning whether he did not check his adoptive parents’ palms for corresponding lines and more.

As professional philosophers, when we are presented with a book such as On What Matters (or set of books), we are disposed to respond to its arguments and set aside the inner psychology of the person: why they write what they do. Do they write it because they believe that this is the approach that best contributes to knowledge, or some other official aim of the academic discipline, or do they write it for some other reason? I observed pencil jottings on the University of Manchester's volume 2 of On What Matters, which criticized Parfit's attempt at metaethics: questions of whether there can be objective ethics, questions of what we can know of moral truth, questions of the nature of moral discourse. "Shame," it patronizingly said. But I have other questions, leaving aside how well he does as a skilled philosopher slightly outside of his home territory: "can he match the specialist here?" the scribbler presumably wonders. One of my questions is why he does not offer paradox after paradox, instead counterexample after counterexample. I consider four solutions. (i) He cannot do that. I doubt that. (ii) He is responsive to a history of paradox deletion. The paradoxes just before the French revolution and the paradoxes made by the bright young things of the early 20th century were deleted. (iii) The counterexamples are valued more by literature departments. These little hypothetical fictions are accorded higher literary value. (iv) There are paradoxes but they are hidden.