Terence Rajivan Edward

Which principles should a society implement, or the basic structure of a society to be more precise? John Rawls's famous original position thought experiment involves rational actors choosing principles for a society whilst being behind a veil of ignorance: they do not know features of themselves which would lead them to prefer principles tailored to their own specific circumstances, such as their talents and income. (An example of such tailoring is that you must have £5000 in the bank to run for public office, preferred by someone with £5001.) Rawls's thought experiment, as he develops it, has some peculiar features. Here I wish to focus on one: the principles are chosen for a self-sufficient society. We assume it is not in interaction with other societies. A problem, which I think moves Professor Miriam Ronzoni greatly, is that in our world there are influential transnational businesses: the company is founded in one country but develops bases in other countries and exerts an influence in your country. She worries that the original position is too unrealistic given our actual circumstances. I anticipate that someone will try to put in transnational businesses into a one society model. "How? They are transnational!" Try to work that out yourself. "I never will." Well then: you are going to have serious problems with how far you can rightly progress. ("So you think you want liberal political philosophy?" to adapt local comedy, from Creatures Comedy Club.) Here is my guess at the solution. (Can your great leader, Professor Christian List, not better enlighten you?) The principles chosen are meant to apply to the basic structure, which we can here take to be a set of institutions (the government, schools, your Mom, etc.). One introduces an institution which is within the society but outside the basic structure and so the chosen principles of justice do not apply to it but it is gaining influence in areas covered by the basic structure, e.g. it provides some education but it is not a school. Then you consider what to do about this institution as it gains influence. You say that a transnational actor is sufficiently similar to this institution for the one society model to still be useful when contemplating our actual circumstances.

PROFESSOR TIMOTHY WILLIAMSON (ADAPTED): Dualism says that the human mind is something entirely distinct from the human body. But then there is a problem of explaining how the mind can causally interact with the body - move an arm for example - because they are so very different: they are radically different. (See 2020: 67) C.D. BROAD (OR ANY COMMON MAN+): The problem of interaction is not best described as arising because the mind and the body are so very different. It does not arise like this: "Human body and dog body - quite different; human body and table - even more different; human body and human mind (for the dualist) extremely different; at some point as the differences become greater a problem of interaction arises." (Find reference to Broad later!) ME: The dualist conceives of the human mind as non-material and therefore not located in space. How can something not located in space affect something located in space? ELIZABETH GASKELL: Something can be located in space but not material. What about a point, a mere point? FRENCHMAN?: I shall make a device by which we can measure how different something is from the human body. And the device will probably establish that at a certain degree of difference a problem of interaction arises: how can a thing that different causally interact with the body. KRISTEVA (HYPOTHETICAL): Yes, I am interested in this device.

I learnt a set of hypotheses about why females are under-represented in analytic philosophy from an article by Helen Beebee and Anne-Marie McCallion. (The list was not first presented by them.) Here is an addition which covers under-representation for various groups, not just females. Let's assume that everyone has the same amount of mental energy. But by the time you are an undergraduate, if you are from an under-represented group you have learnt to devote significant mental energy to more things which are not useful for doing contemporary philosophy, such as considering what does the common man think of me? (Even if you are autistic this may be true.) To illustrate: if you doubt that anyone thinks the mind is the brain, like David Lewis (see my faux Analysis paper today), the common man of today will regard you as a fool: of course some people think this! But maybe it is of no use blocking this doubt for becoming a notable philosopher. To ensure that you devote sufficient mental energy in philosophically valuable directions, you probably need to be a white posh male, protected from certain pressures, pressures which inevitably lead to you devoting precious resources of mental energy in other directions. ("You probably even need someone to wipe your arse," the common man says, or some instances of this type say. Not everyone is nice.)

David K. Lewis asserts that a credible theory of mind must cope with both mad pain and Martian pain. Mad pain is when a human person experiences pain and is in the characteristic human physical state of being in pain (C-fibers firing) but does not react as we do, e.g. avoiding painful stimuli, rather the person's mind turns to mathematics. (Lewis thinks we would find such a person to be mad. Why? Because we would cause them pain and notice that they do not react in the normal way and we would assume that they are naturally disposed to this reaction but are insanely suppressing it in favour of doing mathematics?) Martian pain is when a Martian has another physical system to ours and C-fibers do not fire when the Martian is in pain (they don't have these) but they react to what causes them pain in the same way as we normally do, avoiding painful stimuli. Lewis writes, "A simple identity theory straightforwardly solves the problem of mad pain. It goes just as straightforwardly wrong about Martian pain. A simple behaviourism or functionalism goes the other way: right about the Martian, wrong about the madman. The theories that fail our twofold test so decisively are altogether too simple. (Perhaps they are too simple ever to have had adherents.)" What is Lewis's social intuition like? Of course simple identity theories according to which the mind is just the brain (or the brain and the nervous system) have had adherents! (Did his friends not tell him this? "We allow a person to be super-awake in some areas and go to sleep in others"? Well, change the areas or he will be in for terrible bullying in school!)

This question comes from a friend of mine, an economist. (And also the wife of a Caltech philosopher. We were introduced through a school friend of mine, in the 20th century.) By e-mail, I asserted that the average graduate at a certain elite university must be 20 years ahead of me, prompting the question of why think that. Maybe the thought is inaccurate in some ways. But here is some evidence from experience. (A) I was taught that when you are writing a philosophy paper, you should take one point and cover it thoroughly (clarify it, consider a number of the best objections, etc.). You should not, to use a familiar metaphor, do half-baked work. In my "Cross-disciplinary communication and in defence of half-baked academic work," I drew attention to how presenting a number of half-baked points is a rational strategy when communicating to another discipline as well (or even another subdiscipline within philosophy). It is difficult to tell what they will value and if you do a number of these, the chances increase of one of your points being valued. I was taught to fully-bake in 2003, if not before, while this alternative strategy occurred to me in 2025. After it occurred to me, I remembered H.L.A. Hart's 1973 response to Rawls's liberty principle and P.M.S. Hacker's 1996 response to Davidson on conceptual schemes. They write in line with my half-baking strategy: so many points, most of which are forgotten by almost all readers! Do they already know about the strategy? Maybe not. Maybe someone does and it is already part of the tradition these Oxford philosophers are educated in to incorporate or be open to the half-baked approach, as a good idea in some contexts. The education they get equips them to overcome problems we would struggle to solve: solutions go against the education we provide. ("What are you doing that for? That can't work." No reply for decades.) (B) I shall give one other example. In 1997, Martha C. Nussbaum had published what she describes as an ill-mannered polemic against Nietzsche, in an academic journal. If you tell just about any philosophy or social science postgraduate here that you are writing such a thing, they will think, "How are you going to get published?" ("Are you insane?" even.) The academic journals they know do not publish ill-mannered polemics, to their knowledge! Maybe she figured out a solution to achieve the aim of ill-mannered polemic in academic journal largely by herself and against her background education, much like how I figured out the half-baking solution, but I suspect her education provides her with solutions. "You Martha C. Nussbaum are made for polemics and here is how you can succeed."

I met my care coordinator yesterday - I must meet him roughly once every 2 weeks. He told me that he is a nurse and that because he likes his job (and vocation - he did not use this word), he has stuck to it for 15 years. I think he wished to convey that he does not change from vocation to vocation and also that he does not move jobs much as a nurse. He told me that there are nurses who move to new jobs every year (e.g. to new hospitals). He thinks they do not like the job of being a nurse much. I told him that I had another explanation for the moves, but I would just trust his one in light of his experience. (He also told me he lived with nurses as a student.) However, I cannot seem to let go of my own explanation even if it only works in 1 out of 10 cases of nurses who move jobs every year. There is a nurse who gets employment. She is regarded as reliable and talented by those in charge, but she is also experienced as a threat. If you let this person stay, she will take over. She is given signals to leave after a year. She stays on until she is soon driven out. She moves to another nursing job. When she receives the signals in that job, she just leaves. She moves to a third nursing job and again receives the signals. She likes her vocation but she has decided that it is sensible to move. I cannot let go of this other explanation of why some nurses move from job to job, because I think the problem arises in various fields, and why would nursing be any different? (Because nurses are not clever?) "I am not letting you be in charge, but if you stay, that is what will surely happen." (Of course it requires some filling in of detail: who are the authorities and what is involved in being in charge exactly? Please cite if you fill them in.)

(A) Here is a simplified version of Martha C. Nussbaum's 1997 argument against Nietzsche's being a political thinker: if Nietzsche does not contribute to all seven of these categories of political thought, then he is not a political thinker; Nietzsche does not contribute to all seven of these categories of political thought; therefore (by modus ponens) Nietzsche is not a political thinker. I will not list the seven categories at this point, but I will remind readers that according to Nussbaum, Nietzsche only makes a contribution worthy of the name to one of these categories: moral psychology. Now here is a problem. Are these categories equally easy to contribute to? That is unlikely. So which should you start with, given the aim of being a political thinker. Here is a sensible strategy: start with one which is most difficult, because otherwise you might end up doing six (i.e. contributing to six categories) and then failing on the seventh, and then you fail in your aim (given the requirement to do all seven). Then move to the second most difficult. But here is a problem with this strategy: suppose you start with the most difficult but you find that once you start, you cannot seem to leave this category (or even communicate easily to those who do not specialize on it). That is a speculative explanation for why Nietzsche only contributed to one of Nussbaum's categories. It is speculative, but I think moral psychology is a weak point in the political thinkers she admires and there is a risk of even someone who agrees with all seven failing as Nietzsche did. Also, analogous failures arise in other areas, I believe. (Someone plans to lead the school of social sciences and they start by learning economics with all its maths, aiming to master the other disciplines later. But I have been told by an economics postgraduate that after a while doing economics you can only talk to economists.) Nussbaum herself does not quite make the modus ponens argument above. She plans to apply her categories to various persons, not just Nietzsche, but (here is the "not quite"!) she allows that we might have to excuse no contributions to one category given the circumstances of a person. Once you make this concession, I suspect one category will be perpetually avoided. "I am going to look sufficiently impressive if I do 6 out of 7 and I want to avoid getting stuck by doing that difficult category." That is the concern I wanted to flag about Nussbaum's actual argument, with its concession. (These are the categories she proposes from her abstract by the way: understanding of material need; procedural justification; liberty and its worth; racial, ethnic and religious difference; gender and family; justice between nations; and moral psychology.) (B) Nussbaum tells us that she once took Nietzsche seriously as a political thinker. I find this hard to imagine. Some biography please. (C) I comically imagine both myself and Nussbaum as servants in the political room of the house of philosophical aristocrat Nietzsche. I am of course the higher ranking servant. The house is visited by near incomprehensible characters to us, who value him as a political thinker. She will probably get fired, because you really have to hate Nietzsche to be a servant here. Also her decision-making is very strange to me, though it gets results, e.g. a response by Dr. Donovan Miyasaki.

(A) So, computer (or software, e.g. ChatGPT), you have read Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life by Martha C. Nussbaum. Along with just about everyone who has both read it and progressed in the academic system (to postgraduate level and beyond), you have noticed the shortage of references to secondary literature on the authors or topics she focuses on. What happens now? You can ignore the absence, but is that perverse? You can draw attention to the absence somehow. But how are you going to do that? You will be entering a competition, a sporting league even. We all notice the absence and the competition is about who can deal with it best. You are often presented as a threat to someone like me, someone who is often busy writing essays, but I don't know how you are going to beat my response in "The rationality of Martha Nussbaum's University." Maybe dig up all the relevant but missing references! Maybe just write a poem. These are my best advice proposals, unfortunately. (B) I suspect my response is regarded as that of a clever adolescent. But I did not notice the shortage of references to secondary literature when I read the book at age 19. To notice it is natural, I think, once you progress in the academic system. I am worried that our age-psychology intuitions are not very reliable: Nietzsche is a perpetual adolescent, Poe is, etc. (C) Dr. Joseph Sery says that Nussbaum's book recommendations are academic, elitist, and unsuitable for the casual reader. But not long after her Poetic Justice book, in 1997, she does endorse Nietzsche to some extent and so she has someone on her recommended reading list for the casual reader.

In his much-cited paper "On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme," Donald Davidson argues for the claim that a necessary condition for something's being a language is that it is translatable into our language. He says it is a claim one has to argue for. I wonder whether Davidson took some inspiration from E. Evans-Pritchard. In his essay on Lucian Lévy-Bruhl, in his book on primitive religions, the ever-popular Evans-Pritchard criticizes Lévy-Bruhl for drawing an excessive contrast between primitive and civilized mentality. He asserts that the very fact that we can communicate in and translate primitive languages (or so-called primitive languages) establishes that this contrast is excessive. This will sound very Davidsonian to (all?) philosophers. It suggests a perspective on Davidson as NOT best described as the philosopher objecting to anthropologists, rather the philosopher siding with some anthropologists versus others: Evans-Pritchard implies a similar response to Benjamin Lee Whorf as the one he gives to Lévy-Bruhl. (I did not find the Evans-Pritchard by "magic," by the way, neo-Kantians, or I don't count it as magic. Even Rose Macaulay's Told by an Idiot was not found by magic - "A bit of magic?" I found Macaulay by going through the 20th century and beyond English novel section of the University of Manchester's library - the largest university library here. I examined the older books which have not been taken away to the store and I took especial interest in those where the author has only book. One Rose Macaulay has survived. Why is that? What is in this book? John Rawls's curiosity levels seem low to me for a great philosopher, if he doesn't have enough problems in that league already.)

In 2022 I had a paper published entitled "Traditional literary interpretation versus subversive interpretation" (a classic paper? or written at the height of insanity? non-exclusive or? - if you cut this parenthetical remark out, you cut out so much learning! By the way autistics, not all my brackets are parenthetical remarks.) I treated John Searle as a defender of traditional literary interpretation: a way of interpreting which relies on intuition when doing literary interpretation. But I think this is not quite right. As I pointed out yesterday in "Searle and Derrida order a hamburger," Searle leads to an important perspective on American literature's most famous problem case - Searle is something new in this respect. Since his lifetime, venerated figures of American literature have been complaining about Edgar Allan Poe, e.g. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry James, and T.S. Eliot. Searlean literary theory suggests that it is pointless to keep spelling out what Poe is doing wrong to his many admirers and to the ghost of Poe himself. To understand what you want and deliver it requires more than just a decent specification, according to Searle: it requires a background of shared capacities, which cannot be made articulate (put into words, if you don't like "articulate"). If you try to specify without this shared background, you will never succeed in adequately doing so. But there is an important challenge to this important perspective on American literature's most important problem case. The challenge is this: Poe is appreciated by so many important writers, artists, and critics across the world, most famously in France, Russia, and Japan, that the problem is probably with the American opponents of Poe: the focus should not be on how the admirers lack the appropriate background. If you have a choice between preserving Poe and preserving Henry James, it is Henry James who has to go - do the venerated not understand this?! The American critic's reaction to Poe - "I just don't accept this type" - has to be redirected at civil and responsible Henry James! Well, that's the challenging alternative perspective. Over to you, Martha C. Nussbaum or whoever: "What to make of Poe?" is surely a compulsory question on the examination for being a serious American literary critic thinker. (To Sebastian Gardner: if philosophy of mind and philosophy of science have a common question regarding Freud, it is a question that does not call for your stylish style, like "What to make of him?")

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).