Terence Rajivan Edward

This paper contemplates whether the secret of the success of the West - or Euro-American societies if that is more precise, or the societies of the white man - is because a lot of effort goes into endeavours which don’t involve developing really new product concepts. One refines or elaborates upon some concept already in place. For example, one does not simply make a motor car and think, “That’s done let. Let’s try to conceive and build some other vehicle.” One works on making better and better motor cars. If no one embarked on projects like this - from snobbishness perhaps: “refinement is lower level work” - the West would be impoverished. Its advancements in comfort are owing to such projects. I don’t focus on the motor car, however, rather on video games, comparing my own efforts with that of Professor Greg Kuperberg decades ago. The Tikopia feature in a side-note.

Wherein lies the difference between two islands? What is the difference between the English and French philosophy, or more precisely the philosophy of Paris, sometimes compared to an island: the island of Paris? If I may stereotype, the Englishman, English philosopher, is somewhat closed: he ignores, does not pay attention to a statement, beyond a preliminary scan, on the grounds of its being patently false, blatantly false, obviously false, or else being unclear, or nonsense: unintelligible, a string of words with no meaning. The French, or an exported strand, attempts to increase one’s receptivity by clever folk saying things which the English are disposed to dismiss, when to go beyond some sensible objections proves to be valuable. French philosophy thereby increases one’s receptivity, brings one closer to that sensitive character, the artist. This paper can be taken as a kind of anthropology, contrasting philosophy in two societies, but given its conclusion it brings us to anthropology of art and is not anthropology of art the most difficult? Why do some societies leave behind an art easy to enjoy or marvel at and others do not? In the latter case, is the artist, with his capacity to give happiness, frightened to do so? One must be careful, for there are other hypotheses. (Scrape into Voltaire level?!)

A fictional Kuhn-versus-Davidson student considers whether a post-revolutionary theoretical framework can be presented to pre-revolutionary scientists, focusing on the two sex theory being communicated to one sex theorists. The student argues that the pre-revolutionary scientist can always translate talk of two sexes back into familiar terms, which prevents grasping what the post-revolutionary scientist intended to communicate. (See academia dot edu for the first of this series, probably better than this installment.)

From the mid-2010s a vast literature has accumulated on P.F. Strawson's paper "Freedom and Resentment," often opening by declaring its importance, which I confess feels to me like a trumpet and red carpet roll: all bow before Oxford "royalty." According to Google Scholar, there have been 2000 or so citations in this decade: it is 26th November 2025, by the way, my fellow mad men. (I happened to know a philosopher who was planning to write a book on Strawson but told me he was out of fashion: this was, I believe, a decade before the exponential growth. I wonder whether the next time interest in Strawson is fading, there will be an explosion of literature on "Aesthetic appraisal and works of art." And it will be beyond the labour of one individual even to track notes on the spectator-enjoyment participant-enjoyment distinction.) As far as I can see (leaving aside the curious case of myself), this secondary literature is by much less famous philosophers, even in academic circles. I suspect someone with some authority over these minions has issued an instruction to write on this, but who would do that? (It reminds me somewhat of how various philosophers working on intuitively enduring topics suddenly turned to work on the fashionable topic of transvestite and transsexual rights: Professor Kathleen Stock, Doctor Rebecca Reilly Cooper, etc. But the numbers are much larger and the writings will probably not seem fashionable to outsiders. An exciting new grey frock?) Anyway, how did Strawson's equally stellar contemporaries respond to his essay. Let me begin by anticipating a planned response from anthropologists. Strawson makes a distinction between reactive attitudes and objective attitudes when faced with a person's behaviour. Reactive attitudes treat that person as a responsible individual, for example when you resent someone for cancelling an invitation to their party at the last minute. Objective attitudes treat someone's behaviour as simply caused: "They cannot not do that. That is the way they are." People suffering from certain mental illnesses are engaged with by means of objective attitudes, whereas reactive attitudes are central to normal human relationships, thinks Strawson. The naive babe! What the anthropologist plans to do is describe a society in which there is no such distinction: what Strawson believes is universal is actually a distinction within a local folk worldview. But like a character from a popular music song, Bernard Williams sort-of gets there first. In his book Shame and Necessity, based on his Sather Classical Lecturers, he rejects an account of society when Homer lived according to which members regarded all human actions as caused by the Gods. (Bruno Snell.) I suspect Williams anticipated the anthropological plan and decided to introduce and then ncounter its historical counterpart. He does not say that he is doing this though! Suspicions, gentlemen, suspicions is all we have, and in a field that more or less prohibits speculating upon motivations.

It seems to me that Professor Ingrid Robeyns is trying to represent a novice's perspective on popular philosophy in two of her blog posts for the website Crooked Timber: "How to write a good public philosophy book" (2022) and "What makes a popular philosophy book a good book?" (2013). She states things such as "an important difference between a scholarly philosophy book and a popular philosophy book should be its accessibility. It is fine for a scholarly philosophy book to be written for fellow specialists and hence to be specialised and very likely ‘technical’ in some sense. By contrast, a popular book can, at best, assume an interest in philosophical questions and, perhaps, some basic philosophical background, but definitely nothing more. It should be accessible..." Where's the clever stuff? Where are the insider secrets? (For example, something like "Research shows that there are four main audiences for a popular philosophy book: professional philosophers - 45% of readers, academics in other disciplines, teenagers thinking to study philosophy, and people at risk of religious radicalization.") Anyway, how well does she do with representing the point of view of a reasonably intelligent but clueless person. Imagine she is at the front of a classroom and asks students, "So what do you think makes a good popular philosophy book?" Where's stuff about the cover? Look at the stimulating covers of Renata Salecl books! And where is having an exciting opening paragraph? Isn't that what bookshop browsers are mostly likely to read and then contemplate whether to buy? (Well, I imagine a Parfit-like character conducts a study on which pages different audiences are most like to turn to, while browsing. These people often open up the book in the middle first, etc.)

I was listening to a popular music song of this year, entitled Manchild. It is sung by Sabrina Carpenter, and written by Sabrina Carpenter, Amy Allen, and Jack Antonoff. It contains these fascinating lyrics: “And I like my men all incompetent.” One’s conception of women is usually that women prefer competent men, who have money and status. Now some men probably approach trying to attract a certain woman as like trying to meet certain job requirements, to be competent for a particular job. That leads to paradox, given the Sabrina Carpenter character: in order to be competent for the job of being this woman’s man, one has to be incompetent. But there is a simple solution: more fully, one has to be incompetent by normal standards, not by the standards of this job or this woman. There is no actual contradiction once this clarification is offered. I shall leave the video for Humeans!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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