Jeanette Edwards sounds as if she wishes to reject the question “Why did you do fieldwork there?” I propose a metaphysical route to this, which is to say, “The self before fieldwork is not my self,” but this conflicts with the traditional Lockean account of personal identity.

An interview with Ed Casey where we discuss the intersections of his philosophical work with current political issues, including the Israel-Palestine conflict.

An assurance theory of trust begins from the act of assurance – whether testimonial, advisorial or promissory – and explains trust as a cognate stance of resting assured. My version emphasizes the risks and rewards of trust. On trust’s rewards, I show how an assurance can give a reason to the addressee through a twofold exercise of ‘normative powers’: (i) the speaker thereby incurs an obligation to be sincere; (ii) if the speaker is trustworthy, she thereby gives her addressee the (...) reason. Each claim is controversial; my contribution lies in how I defend them together, linking the sincerity obligation to the provision of reasons. On trust’s risks, I defend a popular thesis about the nature of trust – that trust differs from mere reliance in how it risks betrayal – against the objection that the thesis ‘moralizes’ trust. Such betrayal need not be moral, I argue, because it may derive entirely from how the assurance purports to provide a reason. (shrink)

This paper responds to Mary Beard’s assessment of the claim that Frazer’s book The Golden Bough was popular because it provided practical aid for colonialists. Beard rejects this as an inadequate explanation: reference to colonialism is part of an adequate explanation, but a full explanation must go beyond this particular ism. I present two objections to the case she makes for her inadequacy conclusion, though I don’t think his book aided much with colonialism.

I present an argument against the very idea that anthropology can contribute to the study of specialization. But an obvious reply is “Actually anthropologists at home can study specialization.” I provide some details concerning this reply, focusing on incentives to specialize directed at sensitive souls.

This was abstracted from a lengthier article titled "A Genuine Monotheism for Christians, Muslims, Jews, and All" originally published in the JOURNAL OF ECUMENICAL STUDIES, 52:575-586. Thanks to Paul Chase at Penn Press Journals for permission to use it here. This article proposes an understanding of the identity of God and Jesus that might be attractive and even plausible to persons of all monotheistic faiths. The basic thesis is that Jesus (as both "fully God and fully human") is best understood (...) to mean that Jesus fully identified with God experientially, psychologically, evaluationally, morally, and spiritually; and God fully identified with Jesus in similar ways. Read the article to get the full explanation of this. Might the founders and saints of non-Christian religions also have also thus identified with God, and God with them? (shrink)

This paper argues against a thesis that Shashi Tharoor seems to accept: that R.K. Narayan’s style is bound up with a very specific context, of people left behind by the times in South India. It cannot deal with other subject matter. I present a little fiction to challenge the thesis.

This paper offers a solution to Laura Valentini’s paradox of ideal theory. A reason for idealizing assumptions is because otherwise the theory would be too complicated to be action guiding.

Why did human beings first begin making art? In this paper, I present two accounts of its origins, one of which connects the arts to the desire for group demarcation and another to scientific impulses.

A researcher at the Yale Modernism Lab, Elyse Graham, raises the question of why the early twentieth century literary review The Egoist had such troubling selling, despite its stellar contributors. She puts the blame on regulars Dora Marsden and Richard Aldington. I offer an alternative hypothesis.

Kierkegaard defended romantic motives for marriage at a time in European culture when marriages were still usually arranged for family convenience, status, and social position. The Judge's underappreciated first letter in Either/Or II views romantic love as a bildungs-process that can lead towards neighbor-love, mediating the sharp contrasts that are stressed in his later signed Works of Love.

Jeanette Edwards did fieldwork in the English town of Bacup. Why do fieldwork there? She writes that she is often asked this, whereas the question is unlikely to be asked of an anthropologist who does fieldwork in Papua New Guinea, because it is “axiomatically” an acceptable place for fieldwork. I present two responses to Edwards’ thinking, one of which concerns an asymmetry in how “skeptics” present their questions.

Jeanette Edwards tells us that she is often asked about why she did fieldwork in the English town of Bacup, whereas she has not heard anthropologists who did fieldwork in Papua New Guinea asked why there. She commits herself to a certain explanation for this: potential inquirers assume that non-Western societies are legitimate objects of study for social anthropology but this is not assumed for Western societies. I propose another explanation: it is not about the legitimacy of the object of (...) study, rather “your” levels of commitment. Would you do that for anthropology? (shrink)

J. McTaggart argues that the philosophical conception of time is constituted by the notions of fluid and static time. Since, on his view, neither notion is philosophically viable, he concludes that time is nothing but an illusion that arises from our distorted perception of essentially atemporal reality. In the paper, I argue that despite McTaggart’s failure to prove the unreality of time as such, he does succeed in establishing his lesser claim that the concept of fluid time is without any (...) ontological import whatsoever. (shrink)

In this paper, I present some advice in the style of Nietzsche for a university aspiring to move from being good to great, as a nearby university is.

This paper proposes a solution to a puzzle regarding when people switch from one skilled area of specialization to another, in which they have had little training. Certain analogies between the previous area and the area switched to enable this. I use Susan Carey as an example.

This is a one page handout, presenting a puzzle from J.G. Frazer regarding why, to become the priest of Diana at Nemi, one had to first break a bough in the sacred grove.

This paper presents what I at least regard as a University of Oxford style response to a question often posed to social anthropologist Jeanette Edwards, “Why Bacup?” The question can be a brief way of communicating various puzzles which an inquirer is seeking to solve and I presume “an Oxford person” is going to ask for a clarification of the question, perhaps offering some options.

I argue that absolutism, the view that absolutely unrestricted quantification is possible, is to blame for both the paradoxes that arise in naive set theory and variants of these paradoxes that arise in plural logic and in semantics. The solution is restrictivism, the view that absolutely unrestricted quantification is not possible. -/- It is generally thought that absolutism is true and that restrictivism is not only false, but inexpressible. As a result, the paradoxes are blamed, not on illicit quantification, but (...) on the logical conception of set which motivates naive set theory. The accepted solution is to replace this with the iterative conception of set. -/- I show that this picture is doubly mistaken. After a close examination of the paradoxes in chapters 2--3, I argue in chapters 4 and 5 that it is possible to rescue naive set theory by restricting quantification over sets and that the resulting restrictivist set theory is expressible. In chapters 6 and 7, I argue that it is the iterative conception of set and the thesis of absolutism that should be rejected. (shrink)

In the sixth chapter of The View from Nowhere, Thomas Nagel attempts to identify a form of idealism. The position that he deems idealist is that what there is must be possibly conceivable by us. Nagel claims that this position is held by a number of contemporary philosophers. Even if this is so, I justify the view that it is not a form of idealism.

This essay explores the benefits of utilizing non-scientific examples and analogies in teaching philosophy of science courses. These examples can help resolve two basic difficulties faced by most instructors, especially when teaching lower-level courses: first, they can prompt students to take an active interest in the class material, since the examples will involve aspects of the culture well-known, or at least more interesting, to the students; and second, these familiar, less-threatening examples will lessen the students' collective anxieties and open them (...) up to learning the material more easily. To demonstrate this strategy of constructing and employing non-scientific examples, a lengthy analogy between musical styles and Kuhn's theory of scientific revolutions is developed. (shrink)

I argue that Kathleen Stock omits crucial information in her 2021 book Material Girls, when she debates with Thomas Laqueur, information which enables readers to appreciate the excitement in relation to his historical discovery. I argue further that this is more than just a communicational problem. I then present a reason for rejecting the theory Laqueur uncovers: the initially strange theory that there is just one sex. But I argue that the one sex theory is unlikely to be killed off (...) by this reason. I also raise a concern about Stock’s interpretation of Mrs. Gaskell’s Cranford. The writing style here is influenced by an essay by a medic. (shrink)

What is R.K. Narayan’s position in relation to his story “Such perfection”? It is natural to interpret him as conveying a message similar to one Western readers are familiar with from ancient Greek myths: fear perfection; it offends the gods. But there is room for a more complicated interpretation.

This paper presents two objections to Milan Kundera’s definition of graphomania.

This paper pays tribute to the distinguished legal and political philosopher Joseph Raz, who recently passed away. I present a response to Donald Davidson on conceptual schemes which tries to imitate Raz’s writing style, which attracts me despite the difficulties it poses. The response includes a definition.

What if, instead of a scandal, Jacques Derrida had been accepted by the community of analytic philosophers? My prediction is that little-known philosophers would make points like some which I have made: counterexamples to his claims. There is a different reaction to the question which I consider though, according to which these skills do not just transfer from topic to topic and would not be “activated” by Derrida’s philosophy.

In this paper, I propose that there are or will be examples where the principle of charity recommends an interpretation which makes a text more true than another interpretation, whereas the rival interpretation improves on making sense of its form.

In this paper, I respond to an essay by Tatyana Tolstaya, which describes a contrast between the Russian and the Western perspective on words. Her contrast may generally be true, but I know of a counterexample: a tale about a Western philosopher and his followers and what happened to them.

I address the problem that British social anthropologists ignored the wider colonial relations which the societies they studied were part of, by proposing a solution from reflecting on the structure of European intellectual cults.

Philosophers, and students of philosophy, are often advised to interpret other philosophers charitably. In this paper, I present an alternative to interpreting charitably. I call it “the simple-model technique” and use H.L.A. Hart responding to John Rawls to illustrate it.

George Bernard Shaw did various things to make his essays readable, such as using short sections. In this paper, I raise the worry that they are at risk of being replaced by vocabulary and sayings from folk culture.

In a section of his book Anarchy, State, and Utopia entitled “Macro and Micro,” Nozick makes objections of a certain kind to Rawls. In this paper, I draw attention to a macro and micro objection that scattered material in that book entails.

Anthropologist Gregory Bateson says that a sense of the fundamental unity of science was once achieved by successful specialist scientists expanding into borderline areas of research. I distinguish two ways in which this expansion can occur and note how one of these ways was, from Bateson’s perspective, troublesome for social anthropology.

This is a one page handout presenting objections from Gluckman's book Politics, Law, and Ritual in Tribal Society.

It is tempting to always try to distinguish convincing from poor literary imitation by micro-analysis. The analysis observes various patterns of word and punctuation use in the original and compares those with the imitation. I argue that no such sophistication is needed when faced with Max Beerbohm’s imitation of Joseph Conrad.

This brief paper presents a problem: the specialist on specialization must seek to know the value of specialization across different fields, but that would seem to make them non-specialized. I also propose solutions.

This paper considers two explanations for why the main character of Flora Nwapa’s novel One is Enough does not answer the question of how many times her mother-in-law has visited. One of these is a variation on the surprise exam paradox.

The most well-known kinds of liberalism are based on the doctrine of the atomism of the individual, sometimes called "the separateness of persons." But these doctrines do not seem to allow a country to restrict immigration for the purpose of protecting a national way of life, except for protecting liberalism itself. This can lead to considerable discontent. In this paper, I present a kind of liberalism that addresses this concern.

This paper tries to formulate the paradox of organic solidarity more precisely and propose a solution.

Parts of the Victorian middle class were troubled by how Victorian society was both highly evolved and contained savage parts. I propose a solution to the paradox they faced.

This paper presents two reasons for writing philosophy fast: to succeed in certain competitions; and to realize new and better ideas.

I introduce and examine an argument presented by American anthropologist Herbert S. Lewis against thinking that British anthropology played a significant role in supporting colonialist projects: the British empire was large and centuries old, so it seems very unlikely that two dozen anthropologists late on made much difference.

This paper presents a proposal for how British structural-functionalist anthropology can cope with some change. It may not seem a very sensible proposal, but I think it needs to be registered. I use a structure of universities in a country to illustrate the proposal.

In this paper, I present the possibility of some other analytic political philosophy, in contrast to what is usually given this label. I do so by rejecting what I call the dualism between craftsmanship and vision.

What is the film The Dark Knight about? Is it about sovereignty? I speculate that the opening scene is a dramatic reaction to a mundane event: an essay competition set by a bank which “goes wrong.”.

I remark on the explanation that innate differences account for why some countries are wealthy and others poor. I draw a distinction between two versions of this explanation.

I observe common ground and differences between the first page of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth and Christina Rossetti’s Commonplace.

This paper draws attention to a worry concerning what the book The econocracy says about multiple-choice questions versus essays. They face a problem reminiscent of the problems facing various kinds of relativism.