Terence Rajivan Edward

Much-lauded Guardian journalist Marina Hyde's book What Just Happened?! is a collection of her Guardian columns from 2016 to 2023. It covers some important historical events: the British vote to leave the European Union and coronavirus. It also covers Trump in American politics. I find the opening columns overly preoccupied with the style of politicians as public performers: put crudely, can so-and-so pull off the Alpha Male or Alpha Female style (or big league politician style, if you prefer that term)? A reader with my preferences who opens the book and samples these, may well give up. (Prior to the vote, I spent hours listening to economists' predictions on the likely effects of leaving.) I find that Hyde improves in content-orientation later, interestingly engaging with arguments to do with communism and death. But I suspect there is a "rhythm" to this: a content-and-argument rich article is followed by a dip. Has someone found out that producing accessible and substance-oriented everyday actually leads to madness? (Her front cover clothing style appears to be influenced by me - though how can I prove this? Anyway, my use of such tricks of pacing is minimal, because I didn't know them!) I find Hyde very talented. The book will be of interest to historians, I guess, but I believe this is her public persona, not her, if that matters to them. And it is not exactly what I am looking for, even as comedy, though other reviewers find it funny. I have my own political comedy!

Today the average person in Britain - the many - think that one cannot reasonably expect to have a job in which one works with friends. I have not asked lots of people, but I am confident they believe that. If you are lucky, your colleagues will be friends, but they may not be. They are colleagues, whom one hopefully has a civilized relationship with. Also the average person in Britain, in the United Kingdom (if that be different), in England (part of Britain, part of the UK), believes that one cannot reasonably expect to express a wide array of emotions at work. If you are very lucky, you can, but you may well only be able to express a narrow range of emotions and also have to suppress emotions at work. For example, if you have difficulties in your love life, you may well have to not cry about them while at work, at your place of employment in your working hours: suppress and cry at home in private. ("It is the same in my country," you say? An Argentine anthropologist observed my behaviour at age 21 or 22 and said, "You are not having a proper private-public divide.") Here is a brief history to do with these norms. In the 19th century, a debate arose about whom one should employ, amongst quite posh people. Miss Aye said, "You should test potential candidates and employ the most capable for the job. That is fair. If they are not friends, that is life! Work is work and private matters are private matters." Mister Bee said, "People work better when there is a kind of love between them. You should reject more talented people for one who is like family to us. But there is unlikely to be much fairness in that!" A third group of posh people aimed at a have-your-cake-and-eat-it system. Amongst themselves they said, "We agree that it is best to officially seem to have a fair system. Officially look as if you are employing the best candidate, in terms of talents for the job. But imagine that something upsetting has happened in your love life. Do you prefer to suppress your emotion before some whiz in your job, or do you prefer to meet a dear friend, with whom you can open your soul to at work? Of course, the latter. How can we achieve a synthesis? To the outside world it will be as Miss Aye recommends, but actually it will not be. We will be amongst friends." Unfortunately, they did not make public how this have-your-cake-and-eat-it approach was to be achieved. And TODAY, when, say, the University of Manchester encounters someone such as myself, saying, "It should be like a supermarket, except a person pays with the coin of their talent," for some people it is as if they are being brought back to problems their great-grandfathers solved, when faced with the increasing influence of Miss Aye. (By the way, in his Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Robert Nozick presents a barber shop which is set up to have conversations, it seems, not to make money from haircuts. 1974: 234. PhilPapers, I was thinking whether you want another section edited, quite different to philosophy of anthropology, it may seem.)

We have the impression of artistic history in which one period - one epoch, one era, one age - gives one way to another: the Enlightenment was succeeded by the Romantic period, the Romantic period by the Victorian period. How is this change achieved? Do older hands gracefully leave the stage for youth, or do youth force older hands to recognize themselves as dinosaurs, or whatever your favoured metaphor is. (Is it possible to compete with the dinosaur metaphor?) In the age of the Internet, the second option is difficult to achieve, because even if the older generation of your country decide to give youth the space to define an age, the older generation of another country may not. I observe how the famous star of Indian cinema Madhuri Dixit has done dances which resemble the dancing of a young Chinese girl. The appendix asks what this competition is analogous to in philosophy.

Since the 1980s, British social anthropologists have been increasingly doing social anthropology at home, instead of or in addition to doing fieldwork in exotic societies (from our perspective). But strangely they have not devoted much attention to personal computers, which came into wider and wider use around the same time. Why is that? It is not that anthropologists are technology-averse, because they do write much about new reproductive technologies. My explanation is that social anthropology, for various anthropologists, is pursued like a game, in which there are more points for contributing to some topics as opposed to others (e.g. kinship, gift exchange), and it seems there are not many points to be scored by focusing on computers. But I feel this impression is not quite right. Victorian social anthropology involves specifying evolutionary stages for a society, such as Frazer's famous magic, then religion, then science. Video games provided the opportunity to test evolutionary stage hypotheses, by formulating some, e.g. there will be simple 2 dimensional shooting and tennis games, then more complex 2d games, and finally 3d games. ("Victorian evolutionism is too far in the past to appeal to; you need something better than this to manage these anthropologists"?)

I made a list of David Hume contributions a good university student in philosophy ought to be familiar with and then wondered, "Could not a Bernard Williams, a Robert Nozick, a Joseph Raz, a Derek Parfit produce such contributions: philosophers we do not regard as great?" I present four responses to this question. (a) Hume has more important contributions. (b) Hume's contributions form a system and the system is what is great. (c) These people named don't do anything philosophy without an academic job. Hume pursues philosophies with or without a job. (d) Hume's greatness shows up from many viewpoints, e.g. the literary scholar interested in philosophy, the physicist. (e) Hume is not just a philosopher but his text serves as a source of strength for atheists and agnostics, much as the Bible does for Christians - my favoured solution. (f) "The concept of a great philosopher which is used by the Western canon does not work very well from your standpoint. You are looking for a 2 point gap, as in tennis, between anyone included and you, in all relevant respects: willingness to contribute to philosophy in adverse circumstances, talent for the subject, universality of contributions." (An appendix presents my Hume-like contributions so far. My reason for writing was actually to conveniently record these, conscious reason anyway.)

Imagine someone interested in different societies, but not fine details. They like dramatic contrasts: exchanges in this society mostly involve money and exchanges in that society are mostly by means of giving gifts. They are also interested in religion and philosophy but large-scale contrasts: this political philosopher believes man is evil and this one believes man is good. When faced with subtle differences, they are disposed to say, "I don't understand that," even slightly subtle, although sometimes we doubt they are so stupid. What should this "stupid anthropologist" say about analytic philosophy, which dominates in elite departments in English-speaking countries and also in Finland and Sweden. They should make a dramatic contrast, I think: "The way that these people do philosophy is very different from the philosophy I would encourage. They say, 'I don't understand,' when I feel something I said is comprehensible. Then they distinguish many very slightly different interpretations of a concept involved, and disagree with one another over the best one. It is unclear that these disagreements matter. They say that someone has said something new, different from what some previous person said, when I struggle to register the difference. I must think and think, strain and strain, and then I realize there is some small difference between what the previous person said and this person."

A conservative and a liberal approach to psychiatry can both seek philosophical foundations in David Hume. The conservative approach takes inspiration from Hume's emphasis on custom, such as in relation to the problem of inductive reasoning. Too much deviation from custom is evidence of madness. The liberal approach takes inspiration from the Humean conception of rationality as exclusively concerned with the means taken to ends, not the ends themselves. A man who departs from custom in what seem to be excessive ways may nevertheless count as rational, given his ends in life, such as Hume's end of enduring literary fame.

This paper explains Hume's thinking on the origins of polytheism and monotheism, or presents my interpretation of Hume. Hume thinks monotheism - specifically, there is one God who designed nature - is the outcome of reflecting on the neat regularities of nature and that this would have come after polytheism, because the curiosity or pure love of truth which leads to these reflections belongs to a more refined age. I appeal to Raymond Firth's We, The Tikopia - a study of a remote and technologically simple people - to propose that we cannot be confident of this claim of Hume (that curiosity about the regularities of nature did not exist in primitive circumstances) and also that it is difficult for us to reliably anticipate what specific questions would preoccupy their curiosity (is there any land where one cannot hear the sound of the sea?). I also propose that, if you could somehow send a traveller back in time and then cause him to return, probably any so-called primitive people (or competitive members of them) would react by sending the traveller back with an indirect message: "We are better than this fellow."

I, Milan Kundera, was watching the television: young people protesting against the requirement to wear masks in the war against the spread of a new virus, Covid-19. Young attractive Parisians. At the front were a boy and a girl, university students I presumed. The young man surely hoped to seduce his comrade, after the protests. But would he not mask himself before the act of love? Surely he would.On the one hand, in the name of liberty, the protests are against the requirement to wear masks. On the other hand, when exercising a liberty, they mask: the organ of love is masked. I began to contemplate this paradox. What can explain this difference? It is of course not mere choice: in private affairs some choose to wear masks, as people do at fancy dress parties! No. Our young man feels obliged to mask. The only explanation can be this. The boy and the girl resist the mask of the face for the sake of beauty. They are able to find beauty without the mask: the beauty of strangers, beauty in one another, indubitable beauty. But in love, a mask is worn also for the sake of beauty, for the beauty of the sexual act will be destroyed if later, they find that a disease has been transmitted from one to the other.

The obvious answer is this: the relationship is one of contrast, because Habermas specifies the conditions of an ideal situation of public discourse, whereas Kundera depicts lovers who misunderstand each other in his famous The Unbearable Lightness of Being. The obvious answer leads us to contemplate two other possibilities: the depiction of public discourse in which there is misunderstanding; and the depiction of an intimate relationship in which the words of the other are understood. I also contrast the form of Habermas and Kundera.

This is a bit strange but good…. I had a psychiatric review on Wednesday at my apartment. Also I had one about two months before, in the Rawnsley Building, which is opposite my apartment. Two months ago: it was with a psychiatrist and my regular care coordinator. Two weeks later, I met with my care coordinator and he said that I looked suspicious. Then on Wednesday, the psychiatrist said words to the effect, "The care coordinator said you looked suspicious last time we met. Why did you look suspicious?" She started talking about psychotherapy in that last meeting. I asked her if she knew about Winnicott. She said, "Yes," and listed several contributions of Winnicott, all of which were unfamiliar to me. But the two I know were not mentioned: one of which I presume "everyone" knows. Should I say it or should I not, should I say it or should I not? ("Is it flashy to say it?" I didn't think that.) I decided to say it. "I know the concept of THE TRANSITIONAL OBJECT." Does she know it, or does she not, does she know it or does she not? Is psychiatry just different from what-my-everyone-knows? (Is this question grammatically formed?) I must have looked suspicious. She says that she knows it! Anyway, I remember walking down the road on which I live in 2017 or so. There was some aggression on the street, or was it, who knows. And a tall cross-looking woman with bobbed hair came out of the Winnicott Centre, which is on that road. (She looks like... On the road, I used to live on before moving to my current apartment, further down or up, down or up, the manager from Elizabeth Gaskell House, but I had to move, because I did not get a lectureship in the politics department, second failure at that, this time no interview: who are you employing? How are they better?) The Winnicott Centre has D.W. Winnicott embossed on its pretty wall. I asked does D stand for DONALD? The cross-looking woman said, "YES." Then I walked on happily. (Where is the Winnicott category on here?) Nowadays there is a big flashy building between my apartment and the Winnicott centre, but it is a lot closer to my apartment, I just noticed. It is the Julia Kristeva Building, I imagine! I thought she was about Winnicott! I like Malinowski. "We like Malinowski too." Who are you? Girton? I do whatever I want. (Thanks Martha Nussbaum for your helpful article on Winnicott.)

This paper reflects on the fact that papers I want to respond to by Dagfinn Føllesdal are not properly open access, such as "Indeterminacy of Translation and Under-Determination of the Theory of Nature" and "The Status of Rationality Assumptions in Interpretation and in the Explanation of Action". I cannot download them on PhilPapers and Google Scholar does not give me PDF file links. A lot of philosophers in the analytic tradition make their works open access these days - I can download them easily. Why the change? A difference in character? I suspect this is irrelevant to explaining why most analytic philosophers make their works open access these days. It is the convention, though perhaps the origin of a new convention has something to do with someone's character somewhere. That gives rise the question of to what extent the conventions we follow are the best ones for us. Reflecting on the fact that Susan Haack, who also died this March, has made many of her works available, I wonder whether analytic philosophy is attracting different types, in terms of character or personality or values - "I follow the conventions of my time, pick up my paycheck ,and switch off from work, okay" or "Yes, I want more readers, if there are reasonable means available; I am not an egoless writer, okay" - and the best conventions for the different types are simply different. For the latter type, I propose the conventions in place are not the best.

We appear to attribute value properties to things: “That was an evil thing to do,” someone says - it apparently has the property, the feature, the quality, of being evil; “This is a beautiful painting,” someone else says; and so forth. But how can there be value properties in the world that science depicts: a world of particles, of atoms and the void (or something like that)? “Value properties are queer,” declared J.L. Mackie. Focusing on the arts, two obvious attempts at defence suggest themselves: science is not an adequate guide to the fundamental nature of reality; or it is and we can fit value properties into a scientific worldview. In this paper, I shall pursue a third line of defence, which is only slightly less obvious and far less demanding to pursue in detail: many of us are interested in knowing about reality, such as what is going on in another country, but it is difficult to take in presentations of reality which lack the artist’s touch, so it is rational for us to turn to the arts as sources of knowledge. (Warning: this is way behind McDowell and Cornell Realists, but it is there: in the club!)

This paper draws attention to how the members of another tradition direct their energies differently to how we do. The English philosopher C.D. Broad was impressive at articulating, at formulating, at putting into words quite common impressions: presumably many will nod along to what he says, will agree! But Carl Schmitt is even better at taking common reactions and giving them representation, or one set anyway: a genius at this even. It is a strange direction for genius though: are we not disposed to think "A man this clever should be directing his energies differently, towards something more new"? I raise the question of whether Jürgen Habermas was also trying to carry out a Schmittian project of representation, but for an ordinary liberal. That is perhaps why he seems less innovative than John Rawls, with his brilliant ideas of how to derive fair choices from self-interest.

I didn't make a mistake in using "too" rather than "two": it is a philosophical joke. Are video games art? A response offered by various contributors to this question is that art and games are two different things. Various supposed differences are appealed to in order to establish their mutual exclusivity. And the conclusion sounds initially plausible: when one thinks of art, what comes to mind first and foremost are these things, and when one thinks of games, what comes to mind first and foremost are other things - the lists are totally different. But I feel it is important for assessors of this debate to realize something. If one is making a video game with graphics, one has considerable space for visual artistic expression or representation. I also propose that sole authored video games can better express unconscious contents.

The famous film critic Roger Ebert asserts that video games can never be art. It is not merely that no currently existing video game is art. Video games cannot be art. He tries to avoid foolishness by moderating a little, but it is clear he does not want to listen to the sensible voice within himself, represented by Rick Wakeman! Here I respond to his argument that video games are winnable - one can play them and win - whereas art we experience: there is no winning. I reject his argument. There is a mythic or fairytale quality to some video games storylines and I argue that there is no reason for why an enduring myth cannot by its nature arise from trying to make a video game, one for which there is the prospect of winning. Imagine that Theseus and the Minotaur has not yet been conceived, and a new game involves the string solution in the myth. The myth is surely art, no?

Donald Davidson argues against the claim that others have an alternative conceptual scheme, even that they could have such a thing: a radically different system of concepts for interpreting the data of sensation. But he strangely goes further: he also denies that mankind has one conceptual scheme, because "How can we intelligibly speak of one, if there cannot be two?" Sir P.F. Strawson asserts that this surely goes too far in his opposition to talk of conceptual schemes. But which premise or inference Davidson relies on is mistaken? Hans Johann-Glock has objected on the grounds that we can intelligibly speak of one thing without being able to intelligibly speak of two, if we can distinguish this thing from some other thing, which may not be a thing of the same type, in this case may not be another conceptual scheme. I argue that Glock's objection fails and I present a different objection to Davidson: that speaking of one scheme is a reasonable shorthand for "There are certain concepts that all (language-using) humans share." One may believe this or merely discuss this under the heading of "There is only one conceptual scheme."

The British empiricist philosophers believed that word meanings, concepts, were mental images. Wittgenstein argues that if a mental image is to provide an interpretation of how to use a word, it must not itself require interpretation but the image itself can always be interpreted in multiple ways. He gives the ingenious example of how a picture of a man walking up a hill could also be a picture of a man walking slowly backwards down a hill. This seems a competition. It’s clever, Wittgenstein’s example, and one can explain it to a lot of people. Can one do better? Bertrand Russell seems to refuse to play (while Quine and Kripke go somewhat technical). I have an economic model which explains that, or Russell at least. But the English poet Stevie Smith seems to compete: she has a poem entitled “Not waving but drowning.” (This paper makes some remarks on the myth of genius - does appearing a genius mean suppression of less spectacular material? - and the analytic-continental divide.)

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!