Terence Rajivan Edward

A problem which is discussed in economics is why people don't tell lies more. Economic models predict that it is rational for them to tell lies more than they actually do. The problem is discussed all the way up to the distinguished journal Econometrica. Now mainstream economics is what we call behaviourist in its definition of preference and other terms. ("Behaviourist" is different from behavioural economics, by the way, very different even). Mainstream economics does not define what it is to prefer A over B in terms of inner states of the mind, rather in terms of behavioural dispositions: to prefer A over B at a given point in time means that if you are given a choice of only A or B at that time, then you would choose A. (Or that is the main definition.) Given the behaviourism in economics, it makes to sense to combine economics with a behaviourist approach to language: probably this is required. Your sentence means "There is a rabbit" if and only if the best explanation for your behaviour involves attributing this meaning. (Or an adequate explanation does, if there is no best.) But a behaviourist approach to language limits the amount of possible lies. Let's suppose we are trying to understand the behaviour of a tribe. We propose that a certain native word means the same as "I promise." But if the word is often used without being followed by promise keeping, we do not have sufficient evidence for our interpretation. Why say that the native word means "I promise" if it is so often not followed by doing what was said? The economist is going to find it difficult to integrate his (or her) models and his behavourism. Put simply: his behaviourism requires a behaviourist approach to sentence meaning, a behaviourist approach to sentence meaning will not allow for so many lies, and his models say that rationality requires so many lies.

According to Donald Davidson, in order to count as a language speaker, you must be radically interpretable. What does that mean? An interpreter who is scientifically learning your language from previously being unacquainted with it - a radical interpreter - must be able to learn it, given adequate evidence. They frame hypotheses about your sentence meanings and test them. Now when learning a language in this way, there are privileged entry points: my term for something already familiar in the literature. The radical interpreter should attend more to some sentences to get going, for example simple observational reports ("There is a rabbit", "The cell contains..."). Now there can be a person who is the subject of interpretation but is very careless (or knavish) when providing these entry points. They make inexplicable errors, they are unnecessarily ambiguous, or they omit vital information. There is a significant chance that they will not count as a language speaker by Davidson's criterion, because the radical interpreter cannot get going from the entry points for language learning. I suppose Derrida would have said, "There is an unjustified privileging of these entry points over others. Abandon the privileging." Davidson and also Quine - who famously recommended the privileging and provided us with the rabbit example - are going to say, "NO." (Or they would if they were alive!) A worry that occurred to me is that there is no explanation of how one can get going in learning a language while changing the entry points. It would defeat the project of radical interpretation if one has to appeal to a magic process.

Williamson writes, "Soames's account is based on the old idea that borderline cases involve truth-value gaps. He says rather little in justification of this idea, merely that it seems arbitrary where to locate the cut-off point for a vague term and that it is unclear what semantic mechanism could determine that point. The book shows no awareness of work on the epistemicist alternative that borderline cases involve irremediable ignorance of truth-values. Since I have defended that alternative at length elsewhere, I will not labour the point here." The point here is that Soames's book shows no awareness of work on the epistemicist alternative. Labouring the point is presumably drawing attention to places in Soames's book where awareness would have been helpful. So Williamson is arguing: "(1) If I have defended the epistemicist alternative at length, it is reasonable not to draw attention to places in Soames's book where awareness of work on the epistemicist alternative would have been helpful. (2) I have defended the epistemicist alternative at length. Therefore (3) It is reasonable not to draw attention to places in Soames's book where awareness of work on the epistemicist alternative would have been helpful." (Is there any incentive to reconstruct this argument, as I have just done, and to assess to it, as I will now do?) I am not convinced by (1). I only have access at present to the first page of the review, but it just seems a good idea to provide more detail, e.g. "Look here, Soames assumes X but work on the epistemicist alternative casts doubt on this assumption." (I am also not convinced that Soames was ignorant of Williamson's work, but Williamson is rather careful not to say that Soames himself is.)

In the first volume of his On What Matters, Derek Parfit quotes C.D. Broad on Henry Sidgwick's style of writing and doing philosophy (in a broad sense). Sidgwick "incessantly refines, qualifies, raises objections, answers them, and then finds further objections to the answer. Each of these objections, rebuttals, rejoinders, and surrejoinders is in itself admirable, and does infinite credit to the acuteness and candour of the author. But the reader is apt to become impatient; to lose the thread of the argument; and to rise from his desk finding that he has read a great deal with constant admiration and now remembers little or nothing." I do not think this is a wholly accurate description of Sidgwick's style. I find that on some topics he proceeds at great speed. Anyway, let us grant that it is wholly accurate. Sidgwick is often referred to as a predecessor to the analytic tradition in philosophy and students of it who read Broad's description will probably think: yes, I have encountered quite a few texts like that in this tradition. Now it is possible that Sidgwick was largely responsible for developing this style, but I think that is very unlikely. Even if he made stylistic leaps from what was done previously, it seems likely that something like this existed before Sidgwick. Such a style evolved. (For example, "I am going to consider three objections," says one writer. "Three. That's nothing. I will consider seven!" replies another.) Why the great man history (or second tier man history)? Tell us who the predecessors are! Also how did this style come to develop a near dominant position? One answer is that good philosophy simply requires it. But I am attracted to another answer: that it has been introduced for strategic reasons. One likely strategic reason for it is that this style protects you from plagiarism. (See my "Are individuals a problem for British structural-functionalist anthropology?") I think another reason is that you make it the dominant style to deter "the enemy": someone of philosophical skill whom you don't want in your department and maybe beyond. Owing to temperament, or other factors, they cannot do this style. (See my "Dialogue with O on requirements, the histories of analytic philosophy and psychiatry".)

In his very short introductory book Philosophical Method, Timothy Williamson writes, "There is no law that only humans can think that 5 + 7 = 12. Even if humans are the only creatures on earth to have thought it so far, one day members of future species or sophisticated robots may think it." (p.69) Williamson is referring to scientific laws, like the law of gravity, not legal laws. There is no scientific law that only humans can think that 5 + 7 = 12. Without argument, Williamson asserts that it is possible for sophisticated robots to think this. But the philosopher John Searle argues that computers cannot think. The simple version of his position on robots is that they cannot think (but his qualified position may be that they need to be made of flesh: biorobots?). Searle has a bad reputation as a character, but I find his philosophical work valuable. Williamson actually refers to Searle on pragmatics (p.105).

In his very short introduction to Philosophical Method, Timothy Williamson writes, ***'There is a story of a traveller who asks the way to somewhere and is told, "If I were going there, I wouldn't start from here." The advice is useless because one has no choice but to start from where one is.'*** End of quotation. I do not think that this advice is useless in all possible contexts. It can be taken as a recommendation to the traveller to change their plan: if you are here, then abandon any plan to go there. Can that not be good advice? I think it can be in some contexts. However, some travellers may detect the recommendation and respond, "I must go there."

When I was in hospital, the psychiatrist said words to me which suggested the following argument (the conclusion seems to have since been sensibly abandoned). (1) If you have a divided mind, then you have schizophrenia. (2) You have a divided mind. Therefore (3) You have schizophrenia. The argument interestingly appeals to the original meaning of schizophrenia - to split the mind - rather than to contemporary medical criteria. Davidson's paper "Paradoxes of Irrationality" commits itself to a rejection of (1). I reject (2) for sure.

A University of Manchester building has appeared next to my apartment block and it is violating my right to light. My lawyers are engaged in a legal battle with the University's lawyers. Yesterday I did some research on the right to light, but I am finding the information difficult to understand. According to Google AI today, "The right to light focuses on maintaining a minimum level of natural illumination needed for a property's comfortable use, not necessarily guaranteeing direct sunlight." So the right to light in a building is not a right necessarily guaranteeing direct sunlight? Why not? Surely the point is not this: the Sun does not always shine and if you had such right, then you could get into a legal battle with the sky and so forth. (The clouds must clear, I have a right to direct sunlight!) What is it though? I can grasp a conceptual distinction between natural illumination and direct sunlight. I can at least conceive a reality in which another star is sufficiently close to our Sun to also provide natural illumination. Natural illumination is conceivably provided by some other source than direct sunlight. Whether this is genuinely possible or not, I don't know. Is this a relevant line of thought for understanding the right to light, or merely something an autistic person would get preoccupied with? Now if the University's lawyers somehow beat my lawyers, I will have reason to fear their legal prowess. Nevertheless and despite my struggles, I must beat them: the University's lawyers. Readers might think this is the ravings of an insane person. "How can you beat them?!" But consider the evidence more carefully. I am a leading scholar of one article by H.L.A. Hart. Okay, I have not covered everything, but I have presented three responses to one of his objections to the liberty principle: the reflective equilibrium response, the Foucaultian response, and the situationalist response. I have compared Hart with his predecessor Sidgwick and assessed what later figures had to say on Hart: Amartya Sen and Scott Soames. I have contrasted Hart with Parfit and Raz. I have examined Hart's methods of interpretation. I have addressed his writing style. And more. All this is not nothing. Therefore it has to be something. If a big cat, a jaguar say, fights a large water snake, an anaconda, most experts say that the jaguar will win. But is that always true? The big cat makes one mistake and the anaconda will drag it into the water and do unspeakable things to it.

O: I see you have tried to defend reading short stories. But you need to provide a defence which others cannot easily think of. This is Cambridge who set the question. ME: How about "I like reading about casual sex, not about love, so I like short stories"? O: Don't make fun of me. I'm all about love. ME: How about "I like all stories. Some stories are short stories. So I like short stories"? O: Please don't make fun of me. ME: How about "I like novellas. Some short stories are one word off a novella. One word less does not make any difference. So I like some short stories"? O: Please let me out. RIGHTTOLIGHT: Enough. ME: This is fun. RIGHTTOLIGHT: Enough!

The 1946 film Gilda, from the golden age of Hollywood: is it a feminist film? In one scene, Mundson introduces Johnny Farrell to his wife Gilda. Afterwards, Mundson says to Johnny Farrell, "My wife does not appear to like you, Johnny Farrell," or words to that effect. The viewer can understand why Mundson says that. She behaves rudely. But the viewer does not share Mundson's perspective (or I intuit that a lot of viewers don't and am leaving aside the ones who do). The viewer thinks, "This woman is in love!" The viewer is quite close to an anti-feminist position: "No," from this woman means, "Yes." (By the way, to my eyes, Gilda looks better in all the other scenes. Is that acceptable for me to share? An interpretation based on the perception: when Johnny Farrell is around, Gilda takes care of herself.) "We know all this." My apologies, but it might be useful for my audiences to know it.

There is someone I used to work with, who has gone to Germany to study a PhD on Thomas Mann. He asked me, "Why do you like short stories? Defend yourself." He likes novels. I spent a bit of time coming up with defences. And this is a good one, I believe. "I am interested in realistic characters (by my intuitive standards anyway). And there are some such characters who are in short stories but not in novels. So I am interested in short stories." Well, I should be more careful actually, because I have not read all novels. I would not depend on the assumption that every realistic character in a short story is also in some novel.

I doubt you would like to receive a communication from me. I too would rather not communicate to you. But I wonder if it is imperative that I do. There was, and probably still is, widespread opposition to Nancy Rothwell within the student body: the set of students that is. What to do about this? I just walked through the University of Manchester. By Brunswick Park, I noticed a set of hexagons, each having a distinguished name within it. At the centre was a hexagon with the name Nancy Rothwell. (I am not even sure if the hexagon is a good shape, but my inquiries are at a very preliminary stage on this matter.) Also there is The Nancy Rothwell Building (for engineering!). If I were a discontent student, I would interpret these items as trying to prompt an argument in me: "If Nancy Rothwell is so bad, why do the authorities here value her so much? The best explanation is that there must be something really impressive about her work!" I am writing because I am not convinced that this is a good way of communicating to the student body. In my experience, they regard themselves as the adults in the place, however childish their behaviour seems. For example, when I was teaching, some of them seemed to have the impression "This class is run by a child." This was despite my qualifications and the fact that I was regularly paid for this job. The discontent student may well dare a modus tollens: "If Nancy Rothwell is great, her greatness would be evident from my point of view as it is. This is not evident. Therefore she is not great." (Wyndham Lewis in his contribution to Beginnings said, if a great poet painted, something would come through.) I am not sure if the problem of getting the student to appreciate Nancy Rothwell can be overcome. I regard it as belonging to philosophy of science. But you have lost your best philosopher of science, haven't you?

Listen T. Parent, I do whatever I want, whenever I want! But I read your paper "Ontology and Acceptance" and because I am feeling extremely kind, I will let you know this information. Quite late on in Rose Macaulay's essayistic 1923 novel Told by an Idiot, the character Rome Garden says, "One must make a million unwarrantable assumptions, such as that the sun will rise to-morrow, and that the attraction of the earth for our feet will for a time persist, and that if we do certain things to our bodies they will cease to function, and that if we get into a train it will probably carry us along, and so forth. One must assume these things just enough to take action on them, or, as you say, we couldn't get through life at all. But those are hypothetical, pragmatical assumptions, for the purposes of action; there is no call actually to believe them, intellectually. And still less call to increase their number, and carry assumption into spheres where it doesn't help us to action at all. For my part, I assume practically a great deal, intellectually nothing." A few years ago, 2021 it must have been, I was thinking about whether this position is even coherent. I doubt I am the first. It seems you need to dig up your predecessors and find out what happened to them. But it is obvious. They ran into people such as myself, who put them out of business!

I was planning to take a break from writing today, as advised. I decided to read Timothy Williamson's "Is Logic about Validity?" Reading it, I came across a baffling passage. At the beginning of it, Williamson writes: "Anyway, no logical truth is too simple to be denied by a sufficiently perverse metaphysician." He then appears to give an example in which some people deny that everything is self-identical. He uses his intuition to interestingly guess their argument. He soon says, "They did not mean something different from the rest of us by ‘identical’. They were just not very good at logic." Are they actually perverse then? Prima facie, there is a difference between arriving at an erroneous conclusion against a simple logical truth because one is not good at logic and arriving at such a conclusion because one is a perverse metaphysician. A starting point for defining the case of the perverse metaphysician attacking a simple logical truth is one who is good at logic and presents an attack on a simple logical truth which they themselves do not accept, because they believe there is an error in the attack.

I read some analytic philosophy of art and it sometimes includes commentary on art works. My intuition, if I may share it, is that the professional art critic will, rightly or wrongly, react like this: "I already have someone who can state local commonsense responses to artworks; maybe you do so in a more polished way but the difference is negligible in my eyes. I am looking for very 'out of the box' thinking which is worth pursuing: zany, crazy even." I am not sure if the philosophers of art that I know are suited to meeting this demand. To illustrate what would meet it: in my "Joseph Conrad and Kundera's taxi driver: amusing perspectives" I introduce the view that Milan Kundera can be reduced to Conrad. A detailed fleshing out of this view, drawing on the resources of the analytic tradition on reduction, is the sort of thing that literary critics would be interested in (I intuit).

The title is a bit misleading. Imagine that a leading figure in the English analytic tradition of philosophy tells "his people" the following: you do not need to trouble yourself with trying to achieve a style with literary value. He might have one of two very different rationales for saying this, the second of which is not so apparent. (A) If you want to try and achieve a style with literary value, you can, but it is up to you. It is not a requirement for being an analytic philosopher. (B) Writing good analytic philosophy is so demanding that you have to focus on that and not try to achieve a style with literary value. If what you produce has literary value, all well and good; but don't pursue this goal intentionally. When you write, you need to focus entirely on meeting the requirements of analytic philosophy: being clear and suitably precise and responding to relevant objections, etc. Did you get that? You need to concentrate your energies fully on fulfilling your philosophical duties. Now let me say that one more time, just in case...

H.L.A. Hart argues that Rawls's liberty principle does not account for why we restrict freedom of speech during debates. Hart is debating with Rawls, but is he moving too fast, given this point of his? If Rawls accepts the liberty principle and the principle does not account for why we restrict freedom of speech during debates, then it is rational to ask this question: does Rawls even accept the rules of debate that Hart accepts? (Observe how Rawls debates with Habermas, by the way.) Once again progress on the Hart-Rawls debate made by the supposedly insane!

Early on in the first volume of On What Matters, Derek Parfit praises the little-known utilitarian philosopher Henry Sidgwick: a distant third behind Bentham and Mill. He quotes Sidgwick's criticism of F.H. Bradley: "really penetrating criticism, especially in ethics, requires a patient effort of sympathy which Mr Bradley has never learned to make, and a tranquillity of temper which he seems incapable of maintaining." Given the high praise he gives Sidgwick, it is difficult not to take Parfit as approving. But I saw Parfit speak, in what was perhaps the last lecture before he died. And he did not seem tranquil at all. To my intuitive assessment, he is the most excitable person I have ever met. (I was at the back of the lecturer and I was shuffling a bit. I had decided not to go to the toilet before the lecture. After the lecture, during the question and answer session, he looked at me very aggressively. If he does that, I leave. I could not shake the intuition that he already knew me - or knew of me or whatever. I suspect Parfit kept large league tables of ethics, scoured all the journals himself, and even I figured on his table. To psychiatrists: if I don't write, I will fall back in the league table. I am surely struggling already.)

O: In recent papers, you have identified three requirements that have been presented to you while working in the philosophy discipline area. Earlier you wrote about underrepresentation. Do you think there is also a requirement to be of a certain race? ME: There may be quasi-racism: we can get all the benefits to us of a racist system without any racial requirement. You have to go back to the nineteenth century to comprehend why this is a plausible proposal. I believe many philosophers, psychologists, and psychiatrists at that time accepted that there was such a thing as the English temperament, the French temperament, the Scottish temperament, and so on. Each temperament (supposedly) correlated with different type of body: a different brain and different nervous system. You can read about it in George Eliot's essay "Women in France." The Victorian philosopher Sidgwick says that the Scot Bradley does not have the temperament for ethics and readers of his time would surely have inferred that this is because he is a Scot. Sidgwick is considered a predecessor to analytic philosophy. In the twentieth century, in his essay on inferences in politics, C.D. Broad describes the English temperament as phlegmatic. The rules of analytic philosophy, which have hardly changed, may have been set up to select for a certain temperament: one designed to exclude philosophers of various nations (or many of them anyway). In theory, anyone can meet the requirements. In practice, others cannot get in. I was looking into underrepresentation in analytic philosophy and probably you cannot look into this topic without taking the old nineteenth century temperament system seriously. (I wonder whether the objection some analytic philosophers have to Foucault is not obscurity, rather "There is nothing wrong with old lunatic asylums, based on the temperament system.") O: A psychiatrist working in the old system would say that you cannot do analytic philosophy and stay sane.

O: In your second letter to Thomas H. Smith and Joel Smith, you talk about the requirement not to laugh at the seminar giver in the research seminar. You ask whether if you meet this requirement, there will be another requirement, and a third, and a fourth, etc. Do you have any examples of other requirements or is this just a thought you entertained? You are not trusted and you are sure to be asked this. ME: Yes, two come to mind. I was told in the early 2010s to publish in better journals. My worry is that doing so would have prevented me from writing my paper "On the citation of John Rawls." In that paper I compare my citations with that of Rawls and ask, is Rawls properly global? That must be one of the most satisfying papers ever, more satisfying than anything you have experienced O. I think the better journals requirement is insane. O: In Europe, we have to take a proportion of European people as sane. You have a reason for thinking that the European man who asserted this requirement is insane, but it has to be ignored in Europe. If you build a system of psychiatry in which the person who asserted this requirement is insane, you would produce a non-European system. It would be considered a danger to European civilization. ME: I think the requirement has been withdrawn now. O: What is the other requirement? ME: Specialization!

I presume there are men who approach attracting a woman as if it were, or significantly resembles, applying for a job: you meet the requirements and you are competent for this job; otherwise you are not. But then these lines from a song sung by the popular singer Sabrina Carpenter are a paradox: “And I like my men all incompetent.” To be competent for the job of being this person’s man one has to be incompetent. I present a solution which I have presented before - “incompetent” means more fully “incompetent by normal standards” - and also raise the problem of how a society in which Carpenter’s preference is pervasive among women can survive. Won’t competent men leave, jeopardizing the long-term stability of the society? Perhaps the problem can be overcome by some revision: there is a scale of competence and the women there prefer borderline males, maybe just below the line of competence. But I identify two risks: risk of mistakes; risk of take over by a neighbouring society. And I consider how to avoid the second risk at least.

As I understand him, Bergson thinks that we laugh at human beings when they behave in a mechanical way. I find this perspective strange. I am tempted to offer many counterexamples. But here is an attempt to appreciate Bergson, apart from that this giving of counterexamples is so mechanical. "If you were to abandon various kinds of laughter, this would be the last kind left." He might be right. For example, I would give various courses at a nearby university to much the same standard as the lecturer but for only 20 pence (maybe pretend you don't know which university): the ethics course, the political theory courses, the philosophy mind course, even the jurisprudence course, etc. The university management either knows this or assumes that I would do it for free. Yet they continue to pay lecturers thousands of pounds to give these courses. They behave mechanically. And that is the ultimate in funny.

Hildred Geertz, wife of Clifford Geertz, is little known compared to her husband Clifford Geertz, standard reading on probably every undergraduate anthropology curriculum and several social science courses. I present a paradox concerning Hildred Geertz: surely anthropologists get titles, climb up the ranks in their departments, and publish books because they are ambitious, and pay the price of doing fieldwork because it is better for realizing their ambitions long-term - “you studied this disappearing people or people whose lives were about to undergo dramatic transformation through contact with Western societies”; but Hildred Geertz ended up more or less “hidden” compared to her husband, or ex-husband. A solution is that she is probably the subject of intense attention but it is not very public: amongst feminists academics and female academics in general. I consider this and another solution.

Why read post-colonial literature? An obvious answer is because you are interested in the former colonies. But what if you are not? In my experience, post-colonial literature contains a variety of characters who are a problem for development, such as Rose and Amaka from Flora Nwapa's novels. (I am very impressed.) You can find similar characters in the UK and from other backgrounds, I intuit. They don't feature in prestigious British literature, to my knowledge. "Why not?" I propose this: because prestigious British literature is written by experts in getting rewards from prize committees and elite universities, and the people giving out the rewards just don't have to deal with these characters. They are not of much interest to them. To assume the developed and developing distinction: the rewarders are already in developed institutions! (I recall an author describing large parts of the UK as like the third world: Irvine Welsh. I seem to be converging with him!)

Mainstream economics failed to predict the 2008 financial crash. It has been under strong pressure to change because of that. What is its future? Maybe other social sciences provide a clue. This paper presents two very different lessons one might take from British social anthropology. (A) The structural-functionalist school which dominated British anthropology from the 1930s (if not before) to the 1960s came in for severe criticism in the late 40s and 50s: for ignoring the histories of the peoples studied and colonial relations. That memorable criticism(s) does not appear to have ended its dominance. A late stage structural-functionalism developed. (It is unclear what ended the dominance. Parties interested in the question might have to just try structural-functionalism again.) The mainstream economics will continue, despite not predicting the crash. (B) Economics might be revolutionized, but that won't mark the end of the mainstream models. Some of these models (and other things) that economists have made can float out into other disciplines and become the centre of a research literature. For example, Adam Smith on the origins of money is at the centre of a literature in social anthropology. Anthropologists don't accept the account but they continuously engage with it. (Adam Smith is not a contemporary mainstream economist, but there are models based on his account.)

O: I read your "Serial killers and social structure". Why did you even write this? You write of how some peculiar liberal societies prefer to incorporate a known serial killer over a Chairman Mao. You are going to be asked, "How can a liberal society incorporate a serial killer and be liberal?" Or someone is going to have this question. And then you will have to define all your terms: liberal society, incorporate, serial killer, known, even can. And you will have to consider the answers that different clarifications lead to. That's one long task. It will tire you out. ME: You are getting stressed by this conversation, it seems to me, and its length is not why I am avoiding the task! Anyway, I am thinking to tell them this: a liberal society is usually defined by certain legal rights, such as freedom of speech and movement, but in the definition itself there is no specification of the punishments if you violate someone's rights; so a society can count as liberal and release a serial killer. O: You just cannot resist making that point, can you? Anyway, this will be fun for you: cannot any professional liberal political philosopher detect the point by themselves? ME: They are selected by 1500 word essays and longer. To be confident that they can detect the point by themselves, you would need some other kind of assessment, to check their problem-solving skills, I think. There is a risk anyone will get in who scores well on the other assessment. That might produce protests.

Imagine some children in a field. Two children are the captains of two football teams and they are picking players for their respective teams. Captain 1: I choose John. Captain 2: I choose James. And so on. Towards the end there are two players left. Neither wants to be picked last, of course. Strangely, they are talented players. Is there are some problem with them? They are too selfish perhaps. Now imagine a variation on this familiar scene. The people of a nation are picking individuals to be part of it. The last one left will not be part of the nation. The final pair are a dictatorial figure, such as Chairman Mao (or the current president of China?) and a known serial killer, such as Ted Bundy. The sensible choice is the dictatorial figure, it seems. To get that far, he must actually be a reasonable fellow in many respects, smart, and a good PTA member even. But some liberal nations (or towns, to vary the thought experiment further) just pick Ted Bundy. They are not racist. They just prefer that kind of person. That is how their social structure works even: it incorporates this kind of person over that kind! A disturbing but liberal social system. (A lot of people seem to love Bundy and this is an explanation, I suppose.)

The Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt believes that legal systems are unsuited to dealing with some political problems. Notably, one should suspend the law (partly or wholly?) to better combat an enemy: a threat to the shared way of life in a nation. I have a worry about implementing Schmitt's legal and political philosophy. I am not sure how major the worry is. Probably major. Some legal specialists, I presume, are experts in patching up a legal system. It did not look as if it could cope with a certain problem, but once patched up it can keep going. (They are like the trainers in the Balinese cockfight?) These people will not feel valued if you implement Schmitt's legal and political philosophy. There is not enough value on rule of law. And they will leave the nation for one which values rule of law to a greater extent. Then, in their former nation, these suspensions of the law Schmitt recommends will happen too frequently. They are meant to be infrequent, I suppose. But the intelligence is now just lacking to deal with various problems within a legal system. "Once again, we have to suspend the law to deal with this problem we are facing." (All the other nations laugh at it for that even.)

ME: In a paper uploaded yesterday, I presented an objection to Carl Schmitt which I believe is already known in some circles. I cannot find it in the literature though. The objection is that if a government suspends the law to better combat an enemy, but with the aim of returning to a period with rule of law, there is a reasonable chance that they will not return to this. Instead a dictatorship with poor rule of law is established. Surely people who study political regimes have thought of this. O: Your objection sounds obvious once you say it. You only need to watch the news to have this objection, it seems. But it is possible that it was not known already by anyone before and the possibility is not extremely unlikely. When reading Carl Schmitt (or a presentation of him), there are a lot of things which might distract a person from making the objection, such as vagueness in Schmitt's claims, for example is the law wholly or partly suspended? (The former option seems unrealistic and the latter requires us to withdraw from the histrionic claim that the legal system has been suspended.) Now there is indeed a person who can get past all these distractions and make your objection to Schmitt, if they only knew his work. You are not special! But they are unlikely to engage with Schmitt. The research world is not full of free spirits. We direct students here and there. "Why don't you write on the law of the excluded middle?" "Why don't you write on Carl Schmitt?" "Why don't you write a psychiatric literary case study?" Etc. And we just don't direct the kind of person who can get past all the distractions to work on Carl Schmitt. There is a kind of streaming even. If you continue to work on Carl Schmitt, you will just have a long party of making objections until his philosophy is completely dead! Just leave him be. There is better stuff for you to work on. ME: I am not convinced. The objection I made is surely known! Maybe in Germany.

I am surprised by the large amount of interest in the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt. Schmitt is not a contemporary. Are there not a number of known objections to Schmitt? Is there not a big list somewhere? Perhaps the objections are only known in narrow circles and not in wider circulation. I wish to present one objection, which I believe is known to some people, even if it is not in the Schmitt literature. Schmitt divides the life of a nation into normal periods and extraordinary periods. In normal periods, there is rule of law. In extraordinary periods, there is not. Schmitt is especially interested in extraordinary periods in which the law is (partly or wholly?) suspended to better combat an enemy to the nation, to the shared way of life in that nation. Schmitt recommends such suspensions but the aim should be to return to a new normal period. The objection is from political science. There are just lots of cases where rule of law is suspended and the nation does not get back to a normal period (assuming Schmitt's distinction), so by induction this political and legal philosophy is a bad idea to implement. A group of politicians decides to suspend the law and what you get is an evil dictatorship rather than a return to a normal period. "Can you give examples?" I am not a political scientist, but I suppose there are lots of national histories which suggest this objection. Maybe Chile! "If you don't have examples, why did you write this?" I have read the Schmitt literature and there does not seem to be awareness of the objection, even though some people surely know it. If I don't tell the participants, maybe no one will. Upon reading this, they can ask others or find examples themselves. My apologies for a half-baked objection. Please still cite, if I am the first to put it in writing.