Terence Rajivan Edward

Martha C. Nussbaum's "Is Nietzsche a political thinker?" puzzles me in various ways. Nevertheless, I have some sympathy with her overall conclusion. Her paper is so puzzling to me that I wonder whether I should just treat Nussbaum as a person from a very different philosophical culture. (REEXAMINE?) She writes that Nietzsche in effect claims that his good news can rescue Europe from the crisis produced by Enlightenment liberalism. She plans to reexamine this claim by asking, "What has Nietzsche to offer us, as we try to do political thought in the 1990s?" She does not tell us who examined the claim first, what their conclusion was, and especially why this question she advances is a good way of examining his 19th century claim? (ILL-MANNERED POLEMIC) Nussbaum says that her text is polemical - (how does she even get this published in an academic journal? she must be an expert!) - and writes: "My justification for behaving in an ill-mannered way is that Nietzsche himself greatly favoured such polemics against venerated idols who, tested with a tuning fork, gave a hollow sound." This is her argument it seems. "(Premise 1) If Nietzsche greatly favoured such polemics against venerated idols who, tested with a tuning fork, gave a hollow sound and Nietzsche himself is a venerated idol of this kind, then my ill-mannered polemic against him is justified. (Premise 2) Nietzsche greatly favoured such polemics against venerated idols who, tested with a tuning fork, gave a hollow sound and Nietzsche himself is a venerated idol of this kind. Therefore (Conclusion) My ill-mannered polemic against him is justified." (ARISTOCRACY OBJECTION) Nussbaum says that Nietzsche favours aristocratic political systems. So a contemporary Nietzschean will probably say, "Nietzsche, being an aristocrat of philosophy, gets to engage in ill-mannered polemics, but you - Martha Nussbaum, a mere servant - cannot." This contemporary Nietzchean targets premise 1. (Who is this argument of Nussbaum even addressed to?) (VENERATION OBJECTION) Nietzsche is of course very famous but when you read him, it is difficult to get past the intuitive characterization of him as a memorable perpetual adolescent, despite the ages when he wrote. Perhaps what NIetzsche has in mind by veneration is excluded by this impression. For veneration, you have to be a solemn figure who produces a reaction of "I deeply respect him as an adult character." This objection rejects premise 2. (BY DEFINITION) Nussbaum finds an interesting inconsistency in Nietzsche. He seems to think that the will to power of a dominant group is realized by the political regime of a society and that is all you can say: more precisely you cannot engage in justifying a political regime. But he also rails against socialist and egalitarian societies, as if they are not justified. Nussbaum says that their institutions realize the dominant will to power by definition. Is this by definition, or by an empirical premise of Nietzsche? It seems the latter. (SPECIALIZATION) Nussbaum expects contributions in seven seemingly different areas from any serious political thinker. Does she not accept contemporary specialization?

John Searle continues his debate with Jacques Derrida in his 1994 article "Literary Theory and its Discontents." (I don't have access to it at present; I am writing from my memory but I believe my memory is good - the supposedly overactive hippocampus has not taken this away! "You don't understand this part properly." Put me in a giant maze and I will become mouse and you can foolishly test my spatial memory.) Searle considers the loosely (or exactly) Derridean view that every interpretation is a misinterpretation, that communication is always miscommunication. He disagrees. He memorably asks us to imagine someone's entering a restaurant and ordering a hamburger. The waiter, or crew member, brings an ancient petrified hamburger. The someone says, "I don't want an ancient petrified hamburger. I want a fresh one." The waiter brings a fresh hamburger but encased in concrete. The someone says, "I don't want a hamburger encased in concrete. I want a fresh hamburger not encased." How long will this delivery and further specification go on for? Searle thinks that it is impossible for the someone to fully specify what they want. But he does not think that we should infer that successful communication is impossible, for example where A specifies what they want and B understands. He thinks success here requires a background of shared cultural understanding, but this background cannot be fully articulated. Searle's contribution is important not just for philosophy but also for American literary criticism: probably do not keep telling Edgar Allan Poe and fans, this is the literary hamburger we want! Unless you are McDowell, Searle implies that the desired transformation cannot occur by specification/rational argument. But Derrida's perspective is important too. From a bourgeois economic perspective, if you believe that every interpretation is a misinterpretation then you will miss fewer opportunities. Instead of being fanatically focused on the goal of getting your desired hamburger, which requires successful communication (I assume), you will take the petrified hamburger to a museum and make a lot of money. Hey, a misinterpretation resulted in the delivery of this hamburger but that's life: it's best to make use of it. Also Derrida's approach makes you listen more carefully. You hear things you would not otherwise hear, or if you surely hear them, then you also remember them. Otherwise what you remember is largely determined by the aim or subaim of successful communication (stupidly pursued?), or the broader aim. (An anthropology lecturer - was it Raminder Kaur? - once told me that she did not find Derrida useful for fieldwork. This seems useful.)

Dr. Mihaela Georgieva opens her abstract thus: "This article focuses on the perceived inadequacy of political liberalism to account for the normative priority of political values over non-political ones in cases of conflict between the two. I address this challenge by developing a revised account of congruence built on a public and shared rationale for endorsing the deliberative priority of political values." The first sentence seems acceptable, but here is how I would write (if I believed the obvious hey-wait-a-minute assumption): "Political values have normative priority over non-political ones when there is a conflict between the two: one ought to prioritize political values. This article focuses on the objection to political liberalism that it cannot account for this priority." Georgieva's second sentence does not fit well with Georgieva's first sentence, in my eyes. Here is a proposal for a better second sentence: "I address this challenge by developing a public and shared rationale for endorsing the deliberative priority of political values." Why do you need "I address this challenge by developing A built on B," when B (as intended) seems enough to address the challenge? (As indicated by my replacement for the first sentence, I would call it an objection, not a challenge.) Here is a second proposal for a better second sentence: "I address this objection by developing a public and shared rationale for the normative priority of political values." What is "endorsing" adding? More importantly (I assume), why write of normative priority in the first sentence and deliberative priority in the second? It just raises the question of whether deliberative priority is the same as normative priority. (Some people might not deliberate in case of conflicting values between political and non-political values, because they just don't notice the conflict - they are always focused on one or the other.) What Georgieva surely (!) wants to say is "The objection says that political liberalism cannot account for the normative priority of political values and I am going to provide an explanation of how it can do." For centuries, it has been asserted that you cannot be a competent language user without having logical competence, for example in The Spectator June 8th 1711. (You can find it online and in a literary house I work at.) When I read many Rawlsians and accept this assertion, I wonder: is there some incentive NOT to write so logically? If I accept the assertion, must I accept a conspiracy theory and look paranoid?! Georgieva probably spent ages on her article, yet all these problems are there (and even larger ones in the premise-by-premise reconstruction). To category-error Julia Kristeva: I may have sounded disrespectful previously (sorry, but could even a person of your temperament resist?), but do you know what is going on?

In her 1999 book Property, Substance, and Effect, the distinguished British social anthropologist Dame Marilyn Strathern repeatedly draws attention to this quality of anthropological fieldwork: the fieldworker has a blank page on which they can write down anything of interest. It is clear that she wants to argue that this method of research is better than others when faced with societies that do not fit one's preconceptions, e.g. one assumed one would be writing about theme A, but the big issue in the society one is doing fieldwork in is theme B! She famously values anthropological research over the more structured inquiries pursued by auditors: how well does the institution score on this specific measure and on that specific measure? Now Strathern has been in the business, as they say, for a long time. Back in 1987, she published her much-cited paper, "An Awkward Relationship: the Case of Feminism and Anthropology." There, amongst other things, she presents a hypothetical dialogue between a literary anthropologist and a radical feminist. (A predecessor to the dialogue we now loudly hear between trans-rights activist and radical feminist, I think!) The literary anthropologist aims to better incorporate the perspective of those studied by producing a collaborative text. The radical feminist argues that the literary anthropologist overlooks the problem of different interests: the interests of those studied are very different from the interests of the anthropologist researcher themselves, preventing the production of a text which serves both sets of interests. Strathern does not elaborate on this point, but here is an elaboration. (See my 'On Max Gluckman's everyday life objection to Frazer and my "fieldwork" experience,' for how I arrived at it.) The anthropologist's interests are dictated by which themes are much discussed in the community of professional anthropologists. They are going to write their fieldwork monograph so that it focuses on one or more of these themes. The inconsistency (or at least tension) between 1987 and 1999 should be apparent (the transition from above is slight): 1999 Strathern boasts that the anthropologist fieldworker's blank notepad (or sheet of paper within the notepad) allows them to be more receptive to societies which don't fit preconceptions, i.e. different themes dominate there; but her 1987 paper, when elaborated, says that when writing up anthropologists focus on the themes they have learnt about before going to the field - that is where their interest in gaining recognition lies.

I was reading Bram Vaassen's "On Absence and Abnormality" in the journal Analysis. He writes, "Absences pose a dilemma for theories of causation. Allowing them to be causes seems to make theories too permissive (Lewis 2000). Banning them from being causes seems to make theories too restrictive (Schaffer 2000, 2004)." Commonsense intuitions are being used to assess what is too permissive and too restrictive (the sort captured by the unacknowledged H.L.A. Hart and Tony Honoré). According to our common sense, one can cause the flowers to die by not watering them - by that omission, that absence. But "someone" will argue that banning them from being causes - or not counting them as causes, to be less dramatic - is just a good move even if it violates common sense: it is a good move because of the metaphysics of causation. The "someone" doesn't think causation is human-norm-dependent. (They do not accept the following: you caused the flowers to die because you ought to have watered them and you did not. The ought specifies a human norm.) Even if you achieve an analysis of when there is causation which fits with commonsense intuitions perfectly - after immense effort no doubt - you would just run into this massive metaphysical problem. How does Vaassen motivate the broad project he is contributing to - of providing a commonsense analysis of causation - given the metaphysical problem? Why should we even struggle with his diagrams? Probably he has to defend idealism about causation. Probably a European idealist has got into Analysis in the name of commonsense! But then is it even Analysis? What an abnormality, I assume!

Max Gluckman makes this objection to Frazer: he refers to highly striking material, such as striking rituals, but he omits dull and mundane everyday life, for example he presents a striking marriage ritual but there is no report in Frazer of dull day-to-day married life and its routines. From December to April, I spent a lot of time with stand up comedians in Manchester, attending open mic events and later interacting daily on WhatsApp. It was not dull. Perhaps the comedians themselves intuited that my appetite for amusement is higher than the average person's. But even if it were dull, the material I communicate to anthropologist is very much based on what the dominant themes of anthropology are and this means that a lot of day-to-day interaction becomes marginalized and things which hardly anyone seems to notice become magnified. In particular, what are the criteria for being a community member and did you become a community member before performing? Gluckman's objection seems correct but there is no reason to assume that the themes that preoccupy a community of anthropologists and the day-to-day experience of a fieldworker will converge. And once we abandon the assumption, we have to open ourselves up to the rational omission of large chunks of mundane interaction, when communicating research.

In 1999, I attended a very large conference to celebrate 50 years of University of Manchester social anthropology. I remember that an old anthropologist from the LSE (I believe - maybe not old by the standards of anthropologists, who live so long) stood up and said, "If we do this, then we will have finally become cultural studies," conveying by tone that this was an awful thing to become. The British functionalist anthropology she had been trained in was being replaced by the invader - cultural studies: in her eyes, a mix of fashionable French philosophy and reference points and half-baked social science - the anthropologist is especially concerned about superficial fieldwork, of course. Later as an undergraduate, I told an anthropologist that I had read another anthropologist's book and she said, "Is it cultural studies?" I don't see it as that. It is interested in whether the concept of community is acceptable in anthropology research and so can be interpreted as in dialogue with older functionalist anthropology, which relies on the concept of a bounded society. Society was conceived as like an organism, each of whose parts has a function, the parts forming a coherent whole. I propose that the success of British functionalist anthropology and the length of time in which it dominated (1920s-1960s) and the respect it gained mean that all British anthropologists I met as an undergraduate are engaging with it. (What does Dr. Cultural Studies, David Mills, write about these days?) This particular anthropologist, Sarah Green, started off as a Popperian and Popperian anthropologists were very much influenced by British functionalism. When I said in a seminar that it is obvious that society is not a coherent system, she loudly said, "Why?"

My philosophico-poetical system has at its foundation Paul Valéry’s claim, “To write regular verses… destroys an infinite number of fine possibilities but at the same time it suggests a multitude of distant and unexpected thoughts.” Now someone might say, "Regular verses is a very old-fashioned kind of poetry. A lot of poetry today and for decades is free verse." But my system can lead to an appreciation of some contemporary poetic projects and even undermine this dichotomy of old-fashioned rhyme versus contemporary poetry. First let me share some experience. I read some poetry at Manchester Central Library in late November 2024. It was free verse. After me, a woman performed some one vowel poetry: poetry in which you only use one vowel (and as many consonants as you like; you can use the vowel again and again by the way) - this poet used "u"! Hers significantly eclipsed my effort, I felt. I told a young comedian and poet about what happened and he said, "This one vowel poetry is a mere technical achievement," or words to that effect. My starting point for defining a technical achievement is that persons A and B have the same basic idea (or emotion) but A shows high craftsmanship skill in achieving the goal of expressing or communicating or realizing the idea - then you say that this is a technical achievement by A. I am not sure how to apply this starting point to one vowel poetry, but this is how I see it (I didn't tell the comedian-poet at the time): one vowel poetry is like rhyme. The rhyming poet writes a line and then they may want to say one thing in the next line, but that doesn't rhyme, so other thoughts occur to them in search of a rhyme. Similarly, the univocalic poet is forced by the demand to use only one vowel in strange directions. And these new directions of thought (or emotion) are of value.

On Friday 23rd May, Independent newspaper journalist John Rentoul wrote, " I tend to assume that politicians are trying to do the right thing. If only because being seen to do the right thing is usually the best way to advance their career. So when a politician is attacked for making what seems to be the wrong decision, I try to understand the trade-offs that led them to conclude that it was the least bad option." Let's imagine a person in a position of responsibility who carefully evaluates options and takes the least bad option. In 9 out of 10 cases this person has significant fear: fear of letting people down, fear of looking bad, fear of failing in their career etc. In 8 out of 10 cases all that fear makes them risk-averse. (If they appear to you to take a risk, they have some information that it is not a risk.) The 8 out of 10 do not seem very good for politics. Politics requires risk. You probably cannot advance in a political career if you are the sort of person Rentoul assumes politicians to be - I must do this or else (my community, my image, my career - what does it matter?). The field would just cut you out as unsuitable. If you are an intelligent person and you do not pay your taxes prompty, the political field probably wakes up: "Hey, you take risks, maybe you are suitable for us." Have you ever wondered why there are regular political scandals? You cannot eliminate that from the political field, because safe characters are mostly not suitable for politics. I learnt this from Dora Marsden in The Egoist, by the way. Rentoul writes, "the decision to pay Mauritius to take over the Chagos Islands has me stumped. There must be good reasons for doing this deal, but nobody has been able to explain what they are." Must there? Politicians might as well be outside of the human, given your understanding of human nature. | am sure you know a lot about the differences between them, but try treating them all as interchangeable, as various jokes do. (That Jewish joke: the politician went to the barn and the animals left.)

Peter Lamarque has written against psychoanalytic interpretation of fiction. Here I wish to extend my philosophico-poetical system in order to argue against Freudian interpretation of rhyming poetry. Let us imagine that you are a poet and you come up with the opening line of a poem. You like it. You now search for a line that rhymes with it. Your unconscious, according to Freud, has repressed sexual desires and these want some expression. A line occurs to you that gives your unconscious desires expression. But it does not rhyme well with your opening line. Another line occurs to you that gives your unconscious desires expression, but this time less expression. It rhymes but the poem does not make such sense with it. Finally a line occurs to you which rhymes with your opening line and together the two lines make sense. But it does not give your unconscious desires expression. Your poem just has other demands to meet (rhyming and making sense), which reduce the chances of unconscious desires getting expressed. (Note 1: PhilPapers has a lovely category for this. Note 2: I might extend my system further tomorrow!)

I believe the psychiatrists and care coordinators whom I have met since 2023 are interested in situationalism. According to situationalism, there are no differences in temperament; if two individuals face the same situation, they react the same. Differences in human behaviour are explained by differences in situation. Here are some problems for absorbing situationalism into psychiatry. (i) The DSM, as I understand it from Oxford Textbook of Migrant Psychiatry, is designed so that psychiatrists with different accounts of the causes of mental disorders can use one diagnostic system. (MJE: Hey, are you still responding to Rawls? Remember what I told you!) But how do you apply the DSM given situationalism? It takes the focus off the patient and onto the surrounding environment. You would probably have to ask, who are these people the patient interacts with? Is their way of interacting good for the patient? (ii) Even if you could initiate interaction with the people whom I have interacted with, I don't think they change behaviour easily - this is probably a massive understatement. Consider the cases of Asif Qureshi in the law department of the University of Manchester. In 1997, he had the biggest race relations pay out in UK history. It was widely publicized and I heard about it as an undergraduate from a fellow-undergraduate. Imagine that you are the head of that department. Even if you are racist, you might well say, "Be respectful to this person. It is more trouble than it is worth for our department." In 2008 I believe, he had another law case, which he won. It was hardly publicized. How are you going to change the situation if the 1997 lawsuit does not? (iii) This might just go in problem two. Consider Flora Nwapa's novel One is Enough. In it, the main character finds that her files are stolen at work. She changes her behaviour and the files are no longer stolen: they are stolen until she learns to do her work properly, we are told. This kind of training is probably the last thing you want someone to do to a person who has had a psychotic experience. You don't want them paying attention to hidden messages from powerful bodies - increasing their receptivity in this direction. The psychiatric team expressed the hope that I could return to being an academic: how to avoid paying attention to such messages?

Yesterday I was reading about sampling issues in psychiatry intensely flagged by anthropologists, in Oxford Textbook of Migrant Psychiatry (a book which also cites one of my papers: the citation is from Rachel Tribe). In addition to being admitted to hospital for mental disorder in 2023, I have psoriasis. It began in 2007. I beat psoriasis completely in 2008 or 9, then it returned in 2010. I was beating it before hospital admission except on the head, by very unusual means: amongst other things I found that writing Milan Kundera imitations reduces psoriasis. In 2024, I was given some medicine called Enstillar once again after not using psoriasis medicine for 5 years. I only properly tried Enstillar for 3 weeks before because I broke it. What I have found is that it works well on the head. It has got rid of very persistent and large lesions on the nape of my neck, or one massive lesion. Also it has worked very well towards the top of my forehead, reducing a large lesion (to nothing if I use it regularly). But the small lesions on the body (about 40? rest of the body, to be precise?) return quickly after its use. I found a similar bodily persistence in the 3 week period before Covid, but never used it on the head back then. My worry is that the sample who tried Enstillar are headocentric: a new term devised by myself. What they really care about is that their head should be free of psoriasis lesions. The head is prioritized over the body. "Who cares if the body has lesions? It is covered by clothes." The headocentrism of the West (including Muslim countries even?)! The headocentrism of Monty Python's Black Knight!

Miriam Ronzoni's paradox of the realistic revolutionary first appeared in 2018 in a review essay of Thomas Pikkety and Wolfgang Streek in the European Journal of Political Theory. (She has an essay competition award from Austrian Society for Philosophy, by the way.) She then presented the paradox on the blog Crooked Timber. Here is my presentation of it. This a normal pattern of development: in your youth you think with your emotions and you are socialist; it remains your ideal in middle age but you learn to accept reality and vote for soft capitalism (which is a capitalist system with higher taxation to counteract wealth inequalities etc. - we will just focus on wealth inequalities). Ronzoni interestingly presents an "inverse" pattern of development: in his youth a sensible fellow embraces soft capitalism as his ideal, because this is the system which best balances different values - the values of liberty and equality; but he learns that soft capitalism is unstable (businesses leave with higher taxes, so you either do minimal state capitalism or socialism); he hangs onto his ideal but because it cannot stabilize, his realistic preference, such as when voting, is SOCIALISM. That is Ronzoni's paradox. Now there is an inconsistency in this middle aged revolutionary's thinking which will take a bit to present. Why does he not, when forming his ideal, just go minimal state capitalist? Because that will produce massive inequality (he thinks). So he is taking into account laws of economics when he forms his ideal of soft capitalism: the law that minimal state capitalism will produce massive inequalities and so not realize the value of wealth equality. But then when he learns that soft capitalism is unstable - when he learns another law of economics - he does not change his ideal. He should "input" that other law into his ideal-formation to be consistent: why is ONLY one law inputted? Instead what he does is hang on to his soft capitalist ideal but to be realistic when voting (to take into account economic reality), he votes socialist. (By the way, why in the supposedly normal pattern of development is soft capitalism regarded as more realistic? Is it because people will never give up the liberty they get under a capitalist system?)

MODERNIST JOURNALS EXPERT (MJE): You have published in poetry and you have published in philosophy in unranked journals and you have been rejected in philosophy by ranked ones. What have you learnt? ME: Learnt? Am I one who learns? Or one who learns before two world wars. I must not be that talented then. MJE: What have you learnt? ME: After I was released from hospital in November 2023, I decided to focus on publishing poetry. I submitted a number of poems to poetry journals, by my standards. (By the way, I had tried to publish poetry in 2021 as well.) I submitted poems of mine I liked and I came to this conclusion after a year: if a journal does not publish poems that you the poet likes, then they are not going to publish you (assuming you submit poems that you like yourself). MJE: Anything else? ME: I looked up lists of poetry journals, especially for short poetry. But I found that you can also discover poetry journals (or magazines) like this: you think up a name for a poetry magazine, or part of one, and just put it into a search engine and a poetry journal comes up. I tried some of these. I put in Moon poetry into Google and I found Waxing & Waning. MJE: That's interesting. What about blind review or not? ME: I have not found any poetry journals with blind review. MJE: Is the poetry journal system less fair? ME: Well, I got published with minimal background in poetry. In the University of Manchester, we have anonymous marking (like blind review), but when I was there you could look up who the student was from the number on the script. MJE: Do you think that happened when you got rejected by Analysis? The reviewer looked up who the author is. ME: No idea. I'm not paranoid. In my paper, "The rationality of Martha Nussbaum's University" I point out that certain lecturers are in a precarious position and maybe blind review helps them slightly. BUT it does not produce the kind of results I would expect. When I was an editor for the journal Philosophical Pathways, I did not have blind review and I published what I liked, and there were people from all over the world. Who are these people? I don't know. But that journal shut down. MJE: Yes. How many journals have you shut down already? We have seen tastes LIKE yours before. They are in short-lived modernist literary journals. These journals are good and you can read them today, but you end up publishing people who hate your modernist project, such as Richard Aldington in The Egoist. Also they are very stressful to run. How many hours did you sleep yesterday? ME: I sleep when I want. MJE: How many hours? What time do you call this? ME: I slept in the afternoon and then a long sleep in the night and morning. MJE: You need to sleep less and write a lot more. ME: What if I go mad? MJE: Laura Riding, whom you know something about, jumped out of a window and damaged her spine. Virginia Woolf, who knew high level philosophers and whose father was a literary history expert, nevertheless worked till she hallucinated: the best network was not enough. And look: her essay on cinema is billions of times better than your essay on her yesterday. Maria Tsvetaeva was forced to suicide. These people are of course out of your league, but there are countless minor cases and you stand a chance against them. But you sleep all day. ME: What should I do? MJE: Do whatever I tell you or you will fail. ME: And what do you tell me? MJE: Write more and stop writing on Rawls. If Martha Nussbaum gave up, there has to be a major problem. This person does not give up on a largely sound system. ME But I want to say more things about Rawls and everyone says he is the best.

George Orwell is one of England’s most celebrated writers, including as essayist. I draw attention to a number of confusing things involved in the famous essayist’s definition of nationalism. I am not sure what is going on really, but most sensible grown ups, such as ourselves, must have spaces where we honestly discuss the issues which confront us, including general issues of the day and also some issues of long-term significance. It is helpful for some such discussions to be more public. It seems to me that what happens is that Orwell takes the centre stage, marginalizing honest discussants, while writing in such a tangled and confusing way that attentive readers wonder “How did he get this place?” On the one hand, some such people will regard this as unacceptable and want to ignore him. On the other hand, how can you? Someone has to disentangle everything.

This is a doctrine in continental philosophy: when you introduce a word to refer to a thing, you are somehow murdering the thing. The thing is replaced by the word. What a strange doctrine! Surely when one refers to Hesperus, one does not thereby murder Hesperus. (Poem time: I murdered Hesperus/And my killing is done/ I am a la Rus/I left the other one.) But when we read Virginia Woolf on a film of Anna Karenina, the doctrine seems less strange. She writes that in the film they kiss with enormous succulence. No one will remember that kiss now. All they will remember is Woolf's description. The literary writer "murders" the objects of reference as something we remember and all that is left is their words. If you make literature in a "snobbish" sense your focus when doing philosophy of language, then you might say what some of the continentals do.

Nozick's experience machine thought experiment involves a machine that will provide you with pleasurable experiences for the rest of your life. But Nozick thinks it is rational not to enter the machine. This experiment needs some clarification. What is Nozick's target? Is it the following choice rule (as I said in my paper earlier today on skepticism and Nozick's experience machine)? if you are faced with a choice of A and B, and A will provide you with more pleasure, then choose A - rationality requires this. Or is it... you can work out alternatives by yourself? I want to focus on exactly how the machine beats not entering it for pleasure. Here are two clarifications. (Total pleasure) The total pleasure for the rest of your life is higher than if you enter the machine. ( Average pleasure) Take the amount of pleasure at each moment and the average is higher than if you enter the machine. I am worried about total pleasure: it does not tell you anything about the distribution of pleasure over moments of your life. It's horrible in the machine except for an enormously fun one week at the beginning? (Saddam Hussein on Americans and peasant marriage!) Average pleasure: what if your life is shortened significantly after entering the machine, but each moment is enormous fun? I wonder: is there a clarification of what the machine does which is sufficiently reassuring to a normal subject, the common man as they used to say?

Robert Nozick's experience machine thought experiment is memorable and important for philosophy and fun. As I understand it, it argues against a certain choice rule: if faced with a choice of A and B and option A will provide more pleasure to you, then choose A - that is what rationality requires. Nozick asks us to imagine an unusual machine. If you attach yourself to the machine, it will provide you with pleasurable experiences for the rest of your life. And (this is crucial) you will experience greater pleasure than if you do not attach yourself. Given the choice rule which is his target, rationality requires that you attach yourself to the machine (or "plug in" or "enter" or whatever the exact procedure is). But Nozick says that it is rational not to attach yourself and expects his readers to share this intuition. Given the intuition, the pleasure-focused choice rule must be wrong. There is quite a large literature on Nozick's experience machine thought experiment. I think I have something new to say. Let's imagine a woman who is confronted with the experience machine. She says, "I get pleasure from reality (but not always of course). So in order for the experience machine to provide me with pleasure, it needs to simulate realistic experiences." The machine-operator says, "It will do that." But if it can do that, then the woman might be in a simulation already. She cannot sensibly rule this out, by which I mean she cannot sensibly exclude this possibility ("rule" is being used in different sense here - earlier rule as a requirement and here rule out as exclude). But if she cannot do that, then she cannot be confident that the experience machine is real: she seems to see it and to see and hear the machine operator but are these experiences real or is she already in a simulation? (By the way, you can do the thought experiment focused on other sense modalities.) Now the choice rule Nozick is attacking only applies when you are confident that the choices are real. So in light of what she cannot rule out, Nozick cannot attack the pleasure-focused choice rule with his experience machine. (Julia Kristeva is better than this? She must be very good!)

. Professor Gananath Obeyesekere, who died earlier this year, seems keen on a kind of cultural relativism for patients who are mentally ill: they are best treated by specialists with whom they share a common language of diagnosis, owing to a shared cultural background. For example (his example), a peasant is not best treated by a Western-trained psychiatrist who uses unfamiliar diagnostic categories to the peasant. I propose that this is not entirely practical for a public health system, using a Lacanian literature lecturer as an example. It is too costly for them to have a Lacanian analyst.

Stinson writes, 'A recent high-profile scandal involved the UK’s use of an algorithm to assign grades to students in place of the university entry exams that were cancelled because of COVID-19. The grades of students at state schools tended to be lowered compared to teacher assigned grades, whereas students at private schools were more likely to see their grades increase, resulting in days of angry protest against against class discrimination, where students shouted slogans like “Fuck the algorithm" ' Like that slogan? For example, "Screw the algorithm," "Up yours, algorithm," Etc. So sorry, I couldn't resist! As someone who has coded a bit (computer programmed), I think it is much harder to write an algorithm that does what Stinson describes than one that makes the same deductions for every student. Stinson probably knows much more, but I still suspect the coder. Maybe my standpoint is not easy to access for someone who has done courses in coding. Each student has a number and you write a loop where X starts at 1 and ends at 1000, or whatever the number of students is. (a) You get the data for student X and (b) you do -1 on each grade, then (c) you add 1 to X (increment it is called) and then (d) you start again (stopping at 1000).

Reflective equilibrium is a procedure most famously proposed by John Rawls. (It has its roots in the work of Nelson Goodman. "Who?") Here is a sketch of the procedure. What you do is you take your moral judgments about specific situations, such as that it is morally wrong to put a police officer's life at risk by sending them alone to the apartment of that bad person. Then you try to develop a set of general moral principles which entails these specific judgments. If a few of these judgments are not entailed, then there is the option of dropping them; otherwise you must revise your general principles. (Rawls is famous for his third way political system, which was probably an inspiration for the Clintons and Tony Blair. The people with greatest expertise in such systems, the Scandinavians, mainly focus on reflective equilibrium: everything else must go?) Now you are supposed to test whether you accept the general principles by considering specific moral judgements made in response to actual AND hypothetical scenarios: are they entailed? But as I have pointed out in my paper "Ought-implies-can, the original position, and reflective equilibrium" the addition of hypothetical scenarios makes it impossible to properly carry out reflective equilibrium and makes Rawls inconsistent. The scenarios are infinite. Here is a solution (which I don't personally recommend): focus on judgments made in response to actual situations only. Empirical reflective equilibrium, as I call it, has at least two benefits: it makes reflective equilibrium doable (or doable given some further restrictions) AND it makes Rawls consistent (or consistent given some further restrictions). "No, you cannot abandon it. Now you have to spend your whole life elaborating and defending ERE"? Why can't someone else do that and cite me? "It might not be safe for people of our class to write on. We tested luck egalitarianism carefully"? "Our reward system is designed to say: first proposed by um... E... and given its modern and rigorous formulation by Parfit II."

Toward Mother's Day 2023, I went to a nearby shop looking for a mother's day card. The till worker said, "We don't have any." I found a card which said, "For my wife," and I brought it to the counter and made a joke: this might work as a Mother's day card for someone! I decided to buy the card and I brought it home and put it on a mattress. My apartment at the time was really cluttered with books and rare periodicals. In early April 2023, I could not find the card. I found the balcony door left open. I called the police. I asked them, "What has happened to my card? Has someone got in here?" If the apartment is cluttered with books, the policeman will propose that it might be under one of the books - and he did. I asked the policeman if someone could send an electronic bug under my door and move an item, such as the card. The police reported me to Greater Manchester Mental Health, who did nothing - which was good. (By the way, there was cracked glass on my apartment floor as well and I made the policeman take off his shoes. He did not look comfortable there - my mind was a bit clouded from writing too much but I certainly noticed this. How could you send a policeman alone? I'm very nice though.) In September 2023, I was admitted to North Manchester General Hospital. In October 2023, the consultant psychiatrist referred to my question about the electronic bug as evidence of mental disorder. I said, "It was a hypothesis and I didn't accept it." He said, "Most people do not have hypotheses like that." Maybe his approach is the best. But I have two major worries. (a) From Popper, for the good of science, we should be able to frame any hypothesis we like. (b) What is an out-of-range hypothesis for a person is relative to what is customary for people of their background. It might be completely in-range for a young politician to ask about whether a bug can be sent under an apartment door. But this relativization to background is difficult. What if I have just been away from people of my class background for a long time?

When I read Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life, by Martha Nussbaum, I wonder where the references are to all the ordinary "workers" who address her themes: the hardworking but unsung Dickens and utilitarianism scholar, etc. (Even a contributor of the stature of Richard J. Arneson does not appear. I learnt about his contribution from Greenfield and Nilsson's "Gradgrind's Education: Using Dickens and Aristotle to Understand (and Replace) the Business Judgment Rule." Did Nussbaum read loads for her book and think, "Not good enough, not good enough, not good enough, not good enough, not good enough, not good enough, not good enough..."?) There are the classics, there is the anonymous student she marked, who gets a response, and then there is "me, Sen, Posner, and Becker - you've either got it or you don't!" Maybe that is a slight simplification, but who can resist it? Here I want to propose that Nussbaum's university is more rational than ours given a simple model - a Gradgrindian one ironically. According to this model, the value of all lecturers in a university is measured by citation. But lecturers who are not famous cannot get citations. Because if you are thinking to write about them, then it is rational to find someone famous who says the same thing (or something similar, that's not going to be in the model, is it?) and write about the famous figure: that gets you the econometric boost of STARPOWER. Consequently, the ordinary lecturer - unable to be valued - leaves. What you are left with is postgraduate teaching assistants and stellar figures of our time: Sen, Posner, Becker, Nussbaum etc. ("That's why we buy them up, Mary Beard.") Although I was regarded as a mad person, my teaching assistant focused job strategy was rational, given the model - yours is not! Why do I even refer to you? I am out of your league! It must be because I have learnt much from you, especially compared to what you have learnt from me! (HUMEAN: Hey, this is getting insane - the psychiatrist will get you. ME: You are the psychiatrist. I'll explain this later.)

In her book Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life, Martha C. Nussbaum writes, "Utilitarian rational-choice models are used for various purposes. Some of these purposes are explanatory/predictive: the economist claims, using the model, that if certain actions are chosen, certain results will follow. Other uses are normative: conduct that does not conform to the model is criticized as irrational or substandard for that reason, and the model is used to guide the selection of public policies." Now in my slightly strange paper "Why do economists make these strange assumptions?" I pointed out a third use: models featuring the strange assumptions of economists lead to interesting assertions about what people will do and these are worth testing - they lead to interesting hypotheses that would not occur to economists otherwise. (Yes, they are like rhyme schemes, in my philosophico-poetical system!) An economist can say this: "Martha C. Nussbaum, you are keen on imagination. But if I take ten imaginative but realistic writers and ask them what is going on in a certain situation, they may well say much the same thing. My model generates an interesting new hypothesis - it is the real imagination, the real fancy!"

The founding social anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski believed that any stable society had to meet a set of needs, but different societies had different ways of doing so. Social anthropologists report these different ways. But what about unstable societies? Are there societies which bubble up and disappear? Malinowski would presumably say that these societies are not of interest to social anthropology or are of too low priority. His focus is, I believe, a discreet criticism of Frazer’s The Golden Bough, which sought to explain the origins of a peculiar rite of succession: to become the priest to the goddess Diana at Nemi, one had to be a runaway, enter the sacred grove, and break off a branch from a bough, which entitled one to a fight to the death with the current incumbent. Anyway, the Sabrina Carpenter incompetence paradox allows us to glimpse at an unstable society. If you prefer incompetent men (by normal standards), competent men leave and a collapse occurs.

Kenneth Arrow's 1973 response to Rawls is an attempt to be a spokesperson for most welfare economists. How well does he do? I am not sure, but I have heard a different perspective on Rawls's use of maximin decision making (from an economist who does not want to be named). Rawls considers various principles of justice. (Not "various" in the sense of two very different principles, if this even is a sense, but in the sense of quite a few proposals for what the principles of justice should be.) Rawls evaluates the options by maximin decision making: by considering what is the worst an individual can get given one principle and given another, and favouring when the worst one can get is less bad, e.g. under a utilitarian principle the worst is murder because everyone else is happy then versus under his liberty principle etc a set of individual rights and no friends and poverty by comfortable standards, so prefer the latter. But maximin seems risk averse: afraid to take risks. Rawls responds by arguing that anyone, whatever their level of risk aversion, should use maximin to evaluate principles of justice: the argument why, put simply, is because they affect your ability to carry out your whole life plan. The response I heard is that the economist does not get involved with arguing for maximin over rivals. That is just an interminable discussion! Instead they make a mathematical model and try it with different choice ranking rules. If you agree with the premises, you will agree with the conclusion, regardless of your political stance, etc. (I suspect this is not wholly true. I am wondering how the economist can offer certain pieces of advice without arguing in favour of a choice ranking rule.)

HUMEAN: I read your "Rejected Analysis paper: a moral problem of inductive reasoning" I am interested in your problem. It is a bit strange that you got rejected, but people make mistakes. Why don't you try again? ME: I would get so excited by such a paper and would think, "Everyone, or almost everyone, will love this," and would just put it in, so I am having trouble grasping the perspective of the review. What do they experience when they read the paper? What is the phenomenology of the reviewer? HUMEAN: I don't know, but you could just try again. There's blind review. ME: What if I try 10 times and each time, there is a rejection? HUMEAN: You won't reach this level ten times. This is purely hypothetical. ME: Let's consider it anyway. HUMEAN: Some bad magic is occurring? ME: I have another explanation. Do you know what a perverse historian is? They remove what "everyone" likes from their history. The Analysis reviewer has incorporated the perspective of the perverse historian into their review system. HUMEAN: Is this historian even real or did you just imagine them? ME: Go and read Macaulay's essay on Horace Walpole. I quote: "Who, then, were the first writers of England in the year 1753? Walpole has told us in a note. Our readers will probably guess that Hume, Fielding, Smollett, Richardson, Johnson, Warburton, Collins, Akenside, Gray, Dyer, Young, Warton, Mason, or some of those distinguished men, were in the list. Not one of them." HUMEAN: No Hume? ME: No!

In my "Why read post-colonial literature?" I have drawn attention to how it contains characters not in local English fiction (to my knowledge), characters whom it is useful to know about outside of former colonies: one encounters characters like this. In my "Why read short stories?" I have drawn attention to the possibility of characters in short fiction who are absent from novels. Here I would like to illustrate these points by reference to the story "Emden" by the unfashionable R.K. Narayan. Emden reminds me very much of Amartya Sen, given my standpoint. He is named the oldest man in the town, and is a man of some authority and prestige. He has worked high up in the government and has a large collection of important yellowing documents from his work, including ones relating to a controversy with the Secretary to the Government. His favourite column in the newspaper presents metaphysical arguments. He has "been through" a number of women: we are told, "He married several wives, seems to have worn them out one after another; that was in addition to countless sideshows, ha!" Sen: is he just Emden gone global? "You haven't but we have: seen a man like this before"?

When Kenneth Arrow responded to Rawls in 1973, he did not present himself as leading economist Arrow objecting to Rawls, though owing to STARPOWER it is difficult for readers not to perceive his paper in this way. Arrow says that he has a background in welfare economics and says that his objections are the result of clashes between Rawls and this background. Any economist who accepts this background, or almost any, is going to have these objections: Arrow is a more articulate spokesperson, I suppose, but a whole subfield will nod along. "What is the difference: the economist Arrow's response to Rawls and economist philosopher Amartya Sen's response?" Here is a more interesting question: how are they similar? Sen is famous for his capabilities approach, but his response is at least partly an extension of the general strategy of response chosen by Arrow. Sen points to a clash between welfare economics itself and Rawls. Sen objects to assessing justice systems by the distribution of primary goods: goods any rational person is presumed to want. It is fetishism, says Sen (failing to use capital letters foolishly). He writes, "For example, income and wealth are not valued under utilitarianism as physical units, but in terms of their capacity to create human happiness or to satisfy human desires. Even if utility is not thought to be the right focus for the person-good relationship, to have an entirely good oriented framework provides a peculiar way of judging advantage." Sen is a spokesperson as well: the very background of welfare economist tells him not to value a good in itself, but for what utility it gives. In theory, you can make this point with a minimal amount of economics. ("We have many postgrads who did economics courses? Why don't they make it?" Don't know. See my "Google AI and the macro analysis of pastiche." Anyway, why another day with Kristeva cat and no Nozick?)

I received a mental disorder diagnosis from North Manchester hospital in October 2023. In January 2024, I strangely wanted to work again at the university. I applied for some administration jobs: there are lots and they are all much the same in requirements. I improved my applications and around April 2024, I began to crack the system. Between April and July, I got three interviews: all in science faculties. I put my disability on the applications. (I doubt I have one, so of course I wouldn't do that now.) I also got many rejections despite using the same application and there being a compulsory interview scheme given my "disability." I am worried this system is simply not consistent. (1) If one faculty interviews because of the disability compulsory interview requirement, they all should. (2) One faculty interviews because of this. Therefore (by modus ponens): (3) they all should. I am not sure if premise (2) is true, but I suspect it is: my only admin experience is from being a TA. (I had three interviews early this year with businesses without any disability scheme though, and one last year. I don't apply continuously.) Some other interesting information. In my first interview, there was a test which I found very difficult. You had to order an intray fast. Also the test has an Excel component. I prepared for a whole week beforehand for the Excel part and got exercises to do from my friend. I scored well on the test and I think there should always be a test: if you don't have a lot of experience, doing well is a great boost and you can refer to the test elsewhere and it prompts you to do an Excel test on Indeed and you feel the process is fairer than just a chat. In future interviews, almost everyone said Excel skills are useful. In my second interview, I was asked, "How are you going to motivate yourself to do this job, because it is BORING?" My third interview was online. I don't have Internet at home, because its absence ensures that I read books, clean up, etc. I notified the panel but they had no solution for me. So I had to just go into a university building, "illegitimately."