Terence Rajivan Edward

I evaluate Professor Nancy Munn’s criticism in her 1994 review of Dame Professor Marilyn Strathern’s 1991 book Partial Connections that Strathern does not refer to “classic sources.” For one end (getting included in collections of important articles on a topic), I suppose that the material would be better presented with reference to classic sources. More specifically, it would be better for Strathern to refer to the rationale presented by E. Evans-Pritchard for focusing on primitive societies: that it is best to start with simple and move towards more complex. Strathern implies a rejection of this rationale, but it seems her work would benefit from being recast in a more traditional academic format.

We Germans, we have always been the best scholars, when all is said and done we are but a race of hardworking homework doers. Yet who amongst us must now not be English, can avoid the Anglo-Saxon path? Even we students of man must tread upon it, when if there is one thing the English intellect does not understand, in its lower and its higher forms, it is man, man with all his animal instincts. Imagine yourself then in an English seminar room, ready to clap the dullard gentleman at the front. He is talking about the evolution of societies, the stages a society must go through, the societies still stuck at earlier stages, and how he can explain the common feature of a society 1 and a society 2 by their being in the same stage. We applaud, as we must, but this being England there is opposition and there is debate and there is discussion: the diffusionist who declares that societies share the same feature because there is a society from which the others learn, the Greeks in ancient times, the Italians during the Renaissance, and who, who in our modern times but the English? He imagines an alpha society in any age, a truly great society, from which the others humbly borrow; but does he not know the ways of the herd, this naive diffusionist? It is that which is a cut above the rest which is most borrowed from: the A- society. “Is this really better than I can do? I am not sure,” thinks the neighbour, and quietly produces his own variation on the idea, the object. “If this were truly great, I would acknowledge it, but this: this I shall make my own version of.” And so there is indeed diffusion, a quiet trickling down a gentle slope.

Have you seen the television sitcom Friends? "No, what is that?" It is a fiction about six friends in swanky New York apartments. One of them is really competitive. Her name is Monica. "Monica?" She does not seem an academic type, but perhaps it is easy enough to turn her into an employed and valuable researcher. You present the academic world as a competitive game with rules and a score. "But how do you score in the academic game?" Well, the obvious answer is that you score by getting a citation. Every citation is a goal or a point or whatever. However, there are obvious concerns about using this citational metric, such as some people's high citation scores are just a matter of having more friends. Also there is this concern, which is less obvious I suppose, and occurred to me only recently. Analytic philosophy is famous for prizing logical skills. But sometimes papers are published in analytic philosophy journals which strangely feature flawed premise-by-premise reconstructions of arguments: often invalid, using the language of logicians, when they could easily be valid. A Monica somehow publishes one of these and it is cited by a researcher on this strange phenomenon, who points out the problems and wonders why it was not blocked. Despite knowing the flaws of citation count as a measure of quality, who amongst us is not affected by noticing the citation count? Yet citation could be for this reason. (Anyway, a lot of Monica-types and there will be problems for your university, I suspect. What research projects is Monica University engaged in, etc?)

I cannot recall where I read that managing lecturers is like herding cats. It might have been in a newspaper article pinned up in the head of school administration’s office, school of social sciences, University of Manchester. Anyway, I disagree with this description. (Well, a lot of things are like other things in some respect or other and if one operates with a very slack standard resemblance, yes there is a resemblance.) Herding cats, as I interpret it, is not a doable project because cats are independent creatures who rarely follow instructions. To understand why I disagree with the management description I read, it will be useful to reflect on the life of Bill Gates. He dropped out of Harvard after his first year there, I believe. Imagine if you proposed doing that. You imagine your parents would force you back for another year. (“No, they wouldn’t. Our parents are liberal.”) Imagine Bill Gates as one of the Cosby children, the ones on the famous television show. (Massive boost in ratings!) Claire Huxtable says, "You talk to him Cliff, because he is certainly not leaving Harvard." Are ethnic minority parents illiberal compared to white parents? Instead I propose that Harvard, Cambridge, Oxford and other elite universities: they have ways of detaching students from parental advisory systems, showing them that their parents are clueless and it is time to largely stop listening to them. At the University of Manchester, we have no such system, I assume! FURTHERMORE, we do not have a way of convincing lecturers to listen more to our advisory systems. But they listen to some people. For example, look at all these solid lecturers, some of them based in other provincial universities, who suddenly began work on trans-rights: Doctor Kathleen Stock gave up her polished work on aesthetics to focus on this; Doctor Rebecca Reilly-Cooper gave up her Rawls research to focus on this, etc. There is probably an old fox at Oxford, to use Isaiah Berlin's misleading metaphor, who advised them all: does not do fully-baked work probably, but makes shrewd proposals. The lecturers (who seem so cat-like to us) are very herdable for this person. (Maybe I should be more subtle and say, "Managing lecturers is like herding cats FOR US." But the description I read is meant to identify a general problem.)

I first started teaching for the politics department - or discipline area - in the University of Manchester school of social sciences in 2011. I was a teaching assistant on a large course, with Qi Zheng: Introduction to Political Theory. We were the only ethnic minority teaching assistants, the other eight or nine being white Englishmen or English women, all PhD students or just finished. The course giver was Canadian. Later in that decade the staff composition of undergraduate political theory courses began to change significantly, with lecturers from the European Union and teaching assistants too. Also I lost teaching in this area. I am not racist, but I FEEL the introduction of European Union lecturers is introducing a different psychology to the traditional kind applied in the Anglo-Saxon world: rational actor models. I have drawn attention to one difference in an imitation of mine of Renata Salecl: “we” use a prisoner's dilemma model to predict violence in the state of nature as the rational option given the risk to property and chance of gaining new property, whereas Lacanians predict violence by neurotic subjects in order provoke the law to existence, for this kind of subject cannot bear too thin an authoritative structure of rules. But differences in psychology probably have more transparent practical relevance: I propose adding "The main way you can improve..." to essay feedback to prevent a student from latching onto a minor criticism as the source of their problems (assuming a rational actor intent on getting the highest marks they can), whereas the Lacanian says, "Give the student more room for misinterpretation, or they will become aggressive." Miriam Ronzoni at various points expresses sympathy with the works of Slavoj Žižek. But why are the Anglo-Saxon countries successful in the way that they are? An answer is that they lock up this kind of supposedly emotionally intelligent psychology. (Perhaps human nature is different in these countries, or perhaps they don't care about human nature that much.)

Essay writing feedback: it has a history of being a source of discontent. In the first decade of this century it was: "We are not getting enough essay writing feedback." In the next decade it was: "We are paying £9000 and we are not getting enough essay writing feedback." How do your improve your essay writing feedback? Here is a problem you might face. You give three pieces of essay writing feedback, one of which is referencing related. 10% can be deducted for referencing errors, such as no page numbers on Harvard-style references when the text has page numbers. (By the way, I saw someone in Waterstones Deansgate with a Yale University sweater and I asked him, "Are you to teach referencing?" I thought that was a good joke. "Oh my, telling that joke to a stranger, what ECCENTRIC behaviour!" Imagine if these people actually met an English eccentric.) What you find is that the student says to her friend, "I didn't get a first because I forgot to put a page number for my Tolstoy reference." A solution, from now on do this for below a first class: say "The MAIN WAY that you can improve, given where you are, is as follows:..." But the Lacanian school, with their expertise in the human soul, think that the student does not want their space for misinterpretation to be reduced, so that they have to confront where their main weakness is. And maybe no one gives out below first class now.

FIRST HALF. I was looking through the psychiatry faculty of Penn Medicine, wondering of course do they have a better "system" there than at the University of Manchester, which gets the average doctor ahead? (Probably because the University of Manchester gets rid of people, such as myself, who work out or detect better systems, such as a better template for your description of research. STUPID! “But why keep you when we have a clever old fox in Oxford who provides us solid workers with ideas?”) What do these Pennsylvanian shrinks do research on? This one does research on insomnia and being bipolar (are you not sleeping at night? you must be suicidal?); this one does research on mitochondria and Alzheimer's disease; this one does research on autism in mouse models; this one does research on adolescent therapy and ideas of suicide... Hey, wait a minute: are they all even psychiatrists? Ian Frank does research on antibodies and HIV and HIV vaccines. I didn't even know there were antibodies against HIV. Anyway, what is he doing in this faculty? A puzzle, a puzzle! A solution: HIV affects mental health. A solution: "We started putting one in out-of-context person and we haven't worked out why this is a good idea yet." An even better solution: none of the others know much medicine or biology, apart from some psychiatry and perhaps mouse brains, and Frank is there in case anyone expects them to know stuff. What is a vaccine? "Not sure, but my colleague Dr. Frank can help!" SECOND HALF. Look at all the co-authors on these articles. One sometimes reads of how scientists collaborate in teams and philosophy should be more like that. I recall the distinguished popular scientist Steve Jones telling us about how science is done in teams, who trust each other's knowledge, whereas philosophy disgustingly has individual thinkers. BUT consider this. I was taken to North Manchester General Hospital in September 2023 and when I first met the consultant psychiatrist, I asked him, "Are you really a doctor? What is in the cell?" and he included amongst the items the cell membrane! More than a month later he told me that every time you have a psychotic break, it is harder for your brain to get back to normal, so you must avoid letting this happen to you again. To Steve Jones or whoever: how can I trust the psychiatrist after his cell membrane answer? Anything he tells me I now have to double-check. (Anyway, in the various fields/arenas/etc. I write in, I am probably not good enough to compete without taking risks to my mental health. What about you? Soon "Submit" is replaced with "Dopamine hit".)

Yesterday I read a Guardian review of a recent television comedy sketch show. The review was by Rachel Aroesti and it writes of the almost total eradication of this type of show. But it does not consider why it has been almost eradicated. The obvious answer is competition from sketches which are only available by a newer kind of technology: the Internet. Aroesti fascinatingly says that such sketch shows are valuable not just because of the comedic joy they bring, but also because they are an important mechanism for digesting the world. I would like to add to the big issue of why there is near extinction by saying that I use Internet sketches for such digestion. Some of them are local and done by friends. Others are not. I watch these Chinese Instagram shows wenjiang_caihuaxiaoyuan. It features mainly a team of four female comedians; usually one of them is teaching the others or some of the others. They regularly misinterpret her, in a way that seems on purpose. She may be the same age as them (young women; Chinesettes I "unwisely" call them) but she is looking tired to me. I really relate to these sketches. Some local students are like this too, but also I have officially or unofficially taught a variety of Chinese students, more than half of them women, and a few of them are very like the ones depicted on the show. In the age of China dominance, I suspect many people all over the world have similar experiences, because young attractive Chinese women are sent to "unlock" male dominated overseas systems. The Instagram comedy is all Chinese so far, but maybe overseas comedians are in a better position to digest some of our experiences than the usual posh British TV folk. You should have seen me before and after helping some Chinese postgraduates! For analytic philosophers in general, the Instagram sketches are paradoxically interesting because we are used to reading about this: a distinguished Western analytic philosopher goes to China and the Chinese say to him, "We in China respect our teachers; you criticize your teachers," and the Timothy Williamson figure says, "We respect our teachers by criticizing them," each in their tribal costume, metaphorically speaking.

This paper addresses a question addressed by newspaper reviewer Rachel Aroesti but not originally raised by her: why are television comedy sketch shows hit-and-miss? I formulate the puzzle more precisely, specifying simplifying assumptions involved. I then examine each of the three solutions that she lists: that humour is subjective, that nobody has good enough ideas to have a series composed of all funny sketches, and that one puts unfunny sketches so that the critics find fault with those rather than finding other faults. I then propose my own solution: that audiences need a break after a good sketch. This paper is intended as an imitation of Helen Beebee, but I am not confident that she would address a topic which seems so ephemeral: here today and gone tomorrow.

Assume you have been diagnosed as paranoid, as a mental disorder. Furthermore, assume that you have been subject to a theft: someone has entered your home and removed certain items, e.g. a red notebook and a passport and a novel. There are no signs of break in, but you are not the only person with a key to your apartment: a sibling has one too. How do you deal with this situation rationally? Here is a simplified model. You have two options. Loudly say to the authorities, "I am a victim of THEFT!" But you have been diagnosed with paranoia and there is a significant chance that your statement will be used as further evidence of paranoia. You are now not on medication, but you may well be put on medication again. Alternatively, you OVERLOOK the theft. This protects you from being put on medication again, but you have to allow a significant injustice, rather than even encouraging the authorities to look into it. Of course, outside the simplified model, there is the third way: make an accusation of theft but take great care with the wording so as to avoid an accusation of paranoia: "I looked everywhere and could not find it and the best explanation for its absence would seem to be, um, er, theft. But I could be wrong of course." In practice, this is very stressful to pursue. EXPERIENCE 2023: in February or March 2023 I went looking for a mother's day card and there were none in a nearby shop. I asked. But there was one which said, "To my wife." I brought it to the counter and said this might work for someone, alluding to the Oedipus myths, and decided to buy it, pleased with my joke. I put it on a mattress next to mine, along with a strange card I found in a supermarket. They went missing in April 2023. I called the police. I did not change the lock when I moved in to this apartment in 2015, nor after the theft (strange behaviour for a paranoid person!). I asked the police whether an electronic bug can be sent under my door and remove items. This was later used as evidence for severe mental disorder, despite merely being a question: by a consultant psychiatrist in September 2023. My sister, who changed my lock while I was being treated in hospital (September to November 2023), reported a psychiatrist's view that the crucial fact is that I took action and called the police. My apartment was also said to be cluttered (with books) but it was decluttered and the cards were NEVER FOUND. In August of this year, old passports in an envelope marked "passports" and a red notepad were taken and other items. (I moved my new passport a day or two before from the envelope.) Given 2023, there is actually no incentive for me to report the crime, though I did. Once you have a paranoia diagnosis, given the aim of staying off medication and out of hospital, it is not rational to report various crimes: by a priori model or by experience.

One of the loudest criticisms of mainstream economics is this: economics has not changed sufficiently in light of its failure to predict the global financial crisis of 2008. (Hence we have, or had, the post-crash economic society.) Another criticism one often hears is that economics is overly influenced by a mathematical approach of knowledge: one which specifies axioms and deduces conclusions from them. But I believe the slow development of economics in response to challenges has much to do with the influence of experimental science. As I see economics, at this stage of my development (beyond a beginner probably, but not an expert outside of one or two areas perhaps: transitivity of preferences and maybe specialization), there is/are a small number of simple models, maybe 100 to 150, which economists strive to mathematically formulate. For any given simple model, they consider problems for it and seek to develop an improved version. For example, the simple invisible hand model assumes everyone has information about what is supplied and what is demanded, enabling those who seek employment to focus on somewhere where demand is. But more complex models allow for asymmetric information, such as pioneered by Joseph Stiglitz. But economists as scientists DO NOT just produce complex models which solve problems. What they do is try to produce a model which is different in one respect only from a previous model, in a way analogous to how an experimental scientist seeks to keep all the factors fixed except one, in order to test what the significance of the varying factor is. This potentially SLOWS DOWN successful model-building. A LEAPING ECONOMIST might solve a problem by conceiving a new and more complex version of a model which is different in several respects from the original. But as far as I can currently see from the economic literature (how to interpret this mysterious body to the rest of the world?), there is an incentive for economists to vary a previous model in one respect only and then tell readers the difference that this one variation makes: that is PROPER SCIENCE. The previous model may be the original simple model or a variation already introduced on it in the economic literature.

Imagine that you are a businessman and you set up a literary magazine. Your wife fancies herself a literary writer and she is indeed not bad. She features every week and she is consistent. Other writers can be published on one main condition: they surpass the weekly level of your wife. A most interesting social structure: your wife's role is to set the lower boundary of the magazine. Now what went wrong with the University of Manchester's project to break in to the elite universities. I usually identify what I call the B+ problem as the main problem. But the university management could more or less have stuck me in a comparable role, in the school of social sciences at least. ("Well beyond it actually.") To lecturers: "if you can do better than this near free individual for us, then you are in - otherwise someone else's turn." My impression of the management, or at least the school of social sciences management, is that their thinking is: "once staff or student public discontent goes beyond a certain point, your position is untenable and we have to get rid of you." Of course, it will build beyond that point if they are not doing well in this competition. In my opinion, the management lack the vision of the literary businessman described. "We are ethical, so we don't do that." Not believable. THE STAGE OF THE CONCEPT PLEASE! (Also the material above, applied to the UoM, suggests a reason for some not to specialize: to end up in this role.)

Some philosophers can really write for wider audiences. And philosophy sometimes seems to gather up simple things from other disciplines. In this contribution, I would like to present a simple law and economics model I conceived, taking economics to be the study of rational choice. Two lawyers are negotiating over something, e.g. how to distribute wealth in a divorce. Let's called them Smith and Jones. There is a set of positions available from 1 to 10. Each lawyer occupies a position, representing what they are demanding on behalf of their clients. But 1 does not mean less and 10 does not mean more here, or it does not for both parties. The closer a position is to 1 the more it is to lawyer Smith's advantage (and that of the client being represented). The closer a position is to 10 the more it is to lawyer Jones's advantage (and that of the client represented). There can be five rounds of negotiation: five meetings between the two lawyers. In each round apart from the fifth, there are the options of agreeing or moving to the next round. If there is no agreement in a given round (before the fifth round), then in the next round each lawyer has to move at least one closer to the position occupied by the rival lawyer in the previous round (if lawyer Smith's position is less than lawyer Jones's with such a move). For example, if lawyer Smith occupies position 2 and lawyer Jones occupies position 8 in round 2 and they don't agree, then in round 3 lawyer Smith must occupy position 3 at least and lawyer Jones must occupy position 7, if not less. Given this model, the rational thing for each lawyer to do is start off at an extreme, Smith at 1 and Jones at 10, move one closer to the rival lawyer's starting position in each subsequent round, and then in the fifth round they will be at 5 and 6. In that round, they will either agree or the dispute will go to court. (One can vary the model and have 1 to 11. Or the extremes are not clearly to the client's advantage, because they will seem unreasonable if they get that. Etc.)

In order to establish a Rawlsian liberal society, after giving each citizen a set of basic liberties, one must ensure the implementation of fair equality of opportunity. Fair equality of opportunity is more than a matter of if citizen A and citizen B are capable of doing an advertised job, then they both have a right to apply. Furthermore, if they are equally capable (as indicated by their qualifications?), then they should stand an equal chance of getting the job, while if one is less capable, then the likelihood of their getting the job should be less. I have been thinking about a problem for this kind of equality of opportunity for a while and I was prompted to further think about it after watching a pilot episode of the famous television series The Cosby Show, freely available online from Facebook. (I suspect: if Friends wants more prestige, they probably need episodes freely available for inspection too.) The Cosby family seem an academically high-achieving family, with the mother as a lawyer and the father as a doctor, and oriented towards producing further members of the professional middle class. ("That's disgusting.") Their solutions to the problems of life more or less assume a child who will get good grades in school, but one of their many children is not doing well: getting D grades, when A is the best. It must be a classic problem and exhaustively examined for centuries: what should a mostly clever family do with a stupid child (or in more politically correct terms, and probably more precise terms, what should an academically smart family do with a child struggling with school)? To my knowledge, the research into this issue is not published, but I suspect the consensus is this: whether socialist, liberal or conservative (etc.), the best solution for the family is to give up on merit-based systems (such as fair equality of opportunity). Get your child into a university above their level by reliable merit-assessment, etc. But how do you maintain fair equality of opportunity given this consensus? The implementation of a principle such as this requires citizens to be properly on-board, but even a family like the Cosby family will find that this is a bad idea. Of course, I have not explained why I think this is the consensus, but it seems a plausible explanation of various cases we see at university. Crucial problems for fair equality of opportunity may require people who have looked into the issue of "clever family-stupid child" (sorry) to share their research.

Miriam Ronzoni's 2007 paper ""Two Concepts of the Basic Structure, and Their Relevance to Global Justice" argues in favour of John Rawls's basic structure restriction: that principles of social justice apply only to the basic structure of society. She appears to take the basic social structure of society to be the legally coercive institutions and takes it as excluding the family. She addresses the problem of the social injustice to do with families by arguing that there is a conception of the basic social structure which allows one to address these without violating the basic structure restriction. She gives an example of a society T: "Let us assume, for instance, that in society T the main obstacle to equality of opportunity between men and women is a social rule, which considers socially unacceptable that women engage in public life... The social expectation for the good wife and mother is to be capable of being an entertaining and brilliant host, of organising and running intellectually stimulating dinner parties, and, most importantly, of adequately attending to the education of her children.... Women of society T do not need a better education, but rather a set of institutional devices to protect those of them who decide to go against what is socially expected of them, by making their choices more realistic, less costly, and less stigmatising. Model Y can accommodate this, but model X cannot." (By the way, I remember dinner parties with an intellectual hostess from 2007, but Ronzoni was not at Manchester until 2013 and probably I should reduce attention to suggestive evidence, 3(i) X, etc.) My main worry about this example is that the society described is very unlikely or even impossible given the assumption of a public education system. There cannot be a stable and widespread social rule for these highly educated women not to work (be employed, I should say), because it is a waste of the society's resources to educate them to this extent and for them to not work.

When did man first begin to speak? Surely not when he was first capable of uttering noises in accordance with rules? Man in his savage condition must have immediately felt the danger of this new technology, the word, and wondered for decades, for centuries even, whether his people are ready for it. Nevertheless, for so long history has been dominated by the man of words, comfortable with what all others regard as darkling magic: the ability to combine together the equipment of sense. Only the intellectual, observes Robert Nozick, has left enduring records and these records, surprise surprise, praise as the highest of roles the intellectual. But what would happen if the hunter suddenly put down his bow and arrow, or whatever gizmo has in our day taken their place, and began to write? What good would it do? For he would write like a hunter, after big game. In all but the strangest circumstances, one cannot sensibly expect an accurate record of anything from him. He writes as a man hiding in the bushes, waiting to ambush prey.

After giving all adult citizens a set of basic liberties, the next task for achieving a socially just liberal society, as envisaged by John Rawls, is to realize fair equality of opportunity. Fair equality of opportunity in a society is more than this: if citizens A and B are both capable of doing an advertised job, then both have a right to apply. A further requirement is this: if A and B are equally capable, then they stand an equal chance of getting the job, whereas if B is less capable, then B stands a lower chance. BUT Rawls's principles are only meant to apply to the basic structure of society: there is no obligation of social justice to ensure that institutions beyond this basic structure are just. What though is the basic structure? This is debated from G.A. Cohen to Miriam Ronzoni and also perhaps beyond the Oxford network. A simple thought for us is that it is the public sector of our UK society (or your Canadian or American society, etc.). But then fair equality of opportunity is no great help unless one is going to work in this sector, for example as a schoolteacher in the UK or an NHS doctor. Another interpretation is that it includes all institutions which are institutions by law, including private companies. But whether this is useful enough for you depends significantly on how influential associations outside the basic structure are in your society: e.g. student-run after school clubs for learning Russian or computer coding, etc, and clubs at elite universities. ("You cannot join our club; you are not our type.") Their influence is not something you know when choosing principles. Possibly such clubs and gift-exchange outside the basic structure can figure largely in the society one ends up in. This undermines Rawls’s vision severely. This concern about the basic structure restriction has probably occurred to quite a few in elite universities (and perhaps in relation to the first principle too). But it is not on the public written record. "Well done for finally putting it there"???

In multiple papers, Professor Veronique Munoz-Dardé has raised the problem of whether the family should be abolished, seeking to avoid a No answer. She writes, “The reason to abolish the family is… the fact that as long as the family exists individuals will have unequal life chances.” (1998a: 339) Within families, advantages are passed on to children, which some other children unfairly do not have. Posed this way, the problem seems to be one for left liberals, socialists, and left-wing anarchists. From reading her work, I do not yet have a clear grasp of Munoz-Dardé’s solution, but it is an important contribution to raise the problem. Some solutions have occurred to me, two of which were presented online in 2023. The first and second ones in this handout are not in the literature already though.

“This is a great man”: how quickly do these words fall from the mouths of those new to our higher culture. But are they not true? Not as these newcomers imagine them, for what is a great man to them but a man who, first, is great without aiming to be great to a people, a market, composed like all markets of the mediocre, and, secondly, who must be recognized as great for all. “Tall” says the Englishman, the English analytic philosopher pondering his predicates, is relative. A man may count as tall by the standards of one country and not by the standards of another. So it is with greatness. Even within a country this group and that group, this social class and that, vary in their standards, even amongst we lovers of higher culture. And the man recognized as great, I insist, is always a man who has found his people, figured out their standard, and acted in accordance with it: has realized their image of greatness, which may be no more than that of a Lisa Simpson type. But if it is as easy as all this, why are there so many failures at greatness, so many poor approximations? They are like so many failed businessman, and most amusing of all is he who finds this: he can reach a level of greatness above what this lower class count as great and so he does, but still falls below what this higher class count as great, and finds to his misfortune that there is no social class in his country, his continent even, to which he displays the image of greatness. If only he had the entire world as an audience, how his fortunes might improve. (The relativistic ideas in this Nietzsche imitation first appeared on my Instagram site, earlier today, without the Nietzschean style I assume.)

This paper considers a provincial university with a preference for fully-baked work. It considers the problem of what to do with a research work, or response to a research work, which introduces an off-the-radar idea (of value - I shall omit this qualification) without fully-baking it (e.g. clarifying concepts involved, providing examples, responding to objections). If it is a response to a research work, the idea is off-the-radar in that one cannot reasonably expect a reading group of competent academics to come up with it. Can one develop the idea, fully-bake to use the metaphor, without referring to the brief statement of it? That seems a referencing injustice. I consider proposals for not having this injustice, as well as the question of why be just in this matter. (This paper is another attempt to "parrot" Helen Beebee's paper style, I suppose; it is not a topic she has treated. Is there a limit on how many one can do and stay sane?)

This paper is another attempt at a Helen Beebee style essay, but this time in social anthropology. It is probably of interest to philosophers as well. It presents experiences of mine of aesthetics as an official course at the University of Manchester, followed by an analysis. I argue that the main lessons I take do not require the rich fieldwork of the social anthropologist. Anthropologists are expecting one question or some questions in the philosophy of music and the big question there is quite different.

A researcher A presents an objection in a one liner. A researcher B presents the objection more fully, providing a detailed case study. Does researcher B have to refer to researcher A? I use a brief objection by Maurice Mandelbaum to Thomas Kuhn to illustrate the question. I consider four answers, including the answer that this is never required of researcher B. At present I favour this answer: any of the objections that one expects a representative critic to present can be introduced without referring to an earlier source, whereas other objections (off-the-radar objections?), even if presented as mere one liners, have to be referred to. An appendix introduces current provincial practices in the University of Manchester. Other appendices are chat.

This paper further discusses a paradox I have earlier identified: the paradox of entertainment wrestling. The paradox poses the question of why people continue to watch wrestling after they know that it is fake. I identify four solutions to this paradox, one of which is the Fodorian modularity solution already identified and one of which is a Nozickian solution. A left-liberal solution is also presented, drawing upon the work of John Rawls, and finally a Moorean solution is outlined, named after one of the founding fathers of analytic philosophy, namely G.E. Moore. Note: I depart from the standard structure of a philosophy essay/paper: of specifying a position and an order of discussion early on. (Another Helen Beebee-like essay, I think, though there are some silly remarks in parentheses. Feel free to ignore. Am I trapped in these kinds of essays/papers?) NOTE: this is the abstract, and you may need to download the PDF.