What would be realistic criteria for a state to be considered successful? — Vera Mont

My view is that the opposite of a 'failed' state is a 'successfully functioning' state.

That's a very different beast from a successful state, and 'success' for a state will depend on the criteria one is adopting, which are not going to be universal. Monaco, Saudi Arabia, Norway, Seychelles - different states are successful for different reasons. Surveys of prisoners, or the poor, for example, are going to give you a different league table :)

There is some nervousness in Europe, incidentally, that the USA might become a dysfunctional state, if say Trump were president and right-wing Republicans pursued disruption rather than governance. But for the people who voted such a government in, this might count as success!

Thanks for the clarification, Schop. My puzzlement goes on, however, partly because I don't recognize the leftists I know, here in the north of England, in the 'leftists' who are being generalized over in this thread.

I'm a Green, and the big 'leftist' issue for me is facing up to global warming, and how we transition to a sustainable economy.

Once you're into that as a major area of policy other problems follow, for an anti-authoritarian leftist of my kind: how to rein in financial capital, which monetizes everything and obscures human and environmental value; how income and wealth is distributed, given existing inequalities and the likelihood that worldwide 'growth' is probably near its end (as opposed to 'development', which is always a must); how people are democratically involved in the whole process.

Europe is largely composed of social democracies, which are moving 'right'wards in some respects at the moment, but from a strong consensual basis, with welfare states, socialised medicine and relatively high taxes, owing little to Marx, especially the Leninist flavour. There are issues on which there is obviously a gulf between 'us' and the USA, the most obvious of which is abortion: apart from Poland and Hungary (and pockets of countries like Northern Ireland in the UK), abortion rights are widely accepted in Europe, and the USA's insistence for many decades on tying international aid to reproductive rights has been a source of disagreement about what 'Western civilization' means.

So these are the leftie issues for me, which no-one in this thread has mentioned.

This word 'woke' has caught on only in quite rightwing circles over here, though maybe that'll change. It seems a rather vague insult, like 'reactionary' used to be among liberal lefties (or indeed 'Fascist', which in my youth was a horrible slur). In the UK for instance the rightwing government have trumpeted freedom of speech, but in the last few weeks have been retreatiing to obvious things like 'Freedom of speech has its limits'; alas the first university free speech tsar, Arif Ahmed, appointed by the Tories, is known for believing that free speech includes being able to speak up for Palestinians. (Also trans rights has been less of a left/right issue here, and so for example I'm a supporter of Kathleen Stock, a philosopher who has been no-platformed for her critique of transgender rights)

My last point: is 'race' a mostly unspoken part of this debate? Bill Maher in the opening monologue said 'White' startlingly often to my ear. Brits don't do that so much any more. In the UK of course the staunchest defenders of Empire, and opponents of immigration by black and brown people, have in the last decade been Conservative black and brown ministers of state, so our debate over here has a different feel, but we too have some sort of reckoning to make with slavery and Empire. But perhaps that is an example of how woke I am, that I think such a reckoning is needed!

Is it because I'm not north American that I find it hard to understand this thread? Bill Maher is one of those comedians who doesn't travel well, I think it's one of those things about being divided by a common language.

So I'm a leftist; I'm a strong supporter of universal human rights; and philosophically I am a sort of moral relativist. David Vellemann outlines the kind of view I go with: that different social groups can, indeed will, have incompatible moralities, but their moral concerns are thematically linked. Rational-based negotiation then remains the best way of trying to resolve moral differences.

The argument here seems much more political than philosophical. Who are the 'leftists' who under attack here? Why hasn't anyone quoted any of them? What is the corrective moral view: Maher is a comedian so he has every right not to have an answer, but are people in general arguing for moral objectivism, or what?

Do you think that there is an anti-Jewish bias in Europe stemming from pre-Holocaust ideas of Jewry that is not present in newer Western nation like the US? There are certainly hate groups everywhere but I am wondering if geography influences these trends — schopenhauer1

I'm inclined to think, as a subsequent poster says, that people carry their prejudices with them when they migrate. One reason I responded with a personal story here is that there does tend to be a lot of sometimes quite arcane debate about how other people's prejudices arose over the centuries, but not a lot of confrontation of one's own prejudices.

In Europe the picture is patchy. Germany may seem nowadays upfront in its acknowledgement of Holocaust responsibility, but it took nearly 20 years before such acknowledgement began in a serious way. Some figures of the central European right, e.g. in Poland, tend to mitigate their own countries' role in antisemitic murders 1933-45.

It doesn't look like there was ever that many Jewish people in that region until Britain gave them Israel. — TiredThinker

There was a moderate increase in the Jewish population of 'Palestine' in the late 19th century, some call it 'the first Aliyah'. Then many thousands came from the Russian Empire in the 1900's; and after the First World War many more arrived. The British did not 'give' Israel to Jewish settlers. Rather, the British helped create the tragedy of Palestine/Israel in 1914-20: they first promised support for a single Arab state; they reneged on that with the Sykes-Picot deal of 1916 which carved up Arabia among the Imperial powers, should the allies defeat the Ottomans; they then in 1917 supported the Balfour declaration of a Jewish 'homeland', on condition that the rights of Palestinian Arabs were respected. Mutual contradictions abound in these stances. Once the Ottomans were defeated, the League of nations, formed after the war, granted the 'mandate' over Palestine to Britain, lasting until 1948 (and also the 'mandate' over Transjordan, which became independent in 1946).

It's something of a forgotten war, in 1916-18: British, French and Italians, in alliance with local Arab forces, fought for Arabia against the Ottomans. 50,000 Brits (including Empire forces) died and 500,000 were injured. Those who remember this war already know the name of Gaza: it was the site of two Ottoman victories in 1917. One of my great uncles came home from there permanently mad; another later became a British Palestine policeman, which family lore says he found an impossible job because Britain tried to face in several directions at once.

We should be clear that antisemitism is a 19th century concoction, that grew in an environment where 'race' was a hot topic, hence, in part, Nietzsche's preoccupation with it. Few people note that Arabs, among others, are 'semites' on a race-based division of the world's peoples; the term has become synonymous with Jewry.

I was brought up by anti-Jewish parents. My Dad taught me unpleasant rhymes about greedy Jews; my Mum said the people who'd moved in down the street were 'Very nice people. Jews, you know.'

I do feel some personal grounding is needed in debating 'antisemitism'. A lot of the debate here has been very theoretical. As it happened, for me, loads of my schoolmates, including the arty ones I got on with, were Jewish and I emerged into adulthood without prejudice, indeed a bit pro-Jewish, and anti-racist in general, as far as I can tell. But those rhymes and comments of my parents live forever in me. I can't wipe my memory. There is something atavistic about prejudice, to find emotional and intellectual explanations for life's difficulties in the Other, and Jews are Other everywhere they have gone - yet have resolutely survived.

Now Zionists among Jewry have established a state where every non-Jew is Other. To me this is both a remarkable triumph over adversity, and once a two-state solution became impossible, a never-ending tragedy. Leaders squirm over the difficulties this gives rise to: in my native UK the opposition party leader can't bring himself to condemn what I think of as vile Israeli actions (in response to vile Hamas actions); it seems like only the Irish government in the EU dissents from an EU pro-Israeli stance; but the ordinary human sympathies of Brits, Irish and Europeans are, as far as I can see, more with the helpless Palestinians. Awfully, under these sympathies the atavism of anti-Jewishness bubbles up. I just try to stay reasonable. What more can be done?

Do you suppose there are a lot of children hanging out at armament factories during the night? — Leontiskos

The OP says 'debris from the [factory] explosion kills 100 civilians'. Are you saying these civilians were 'hanging out at armament factories' rather than, say, going about their normal business, maybe living a few streets away? I don't follow.

It's interesting how, in describing the two events, the actions of Group A are described more emotively, with butcher and smashed. One's own ethical code shows in one's descriptions.

In practice Group B are also butchering, and their actions smash children against walls too. They don't do it with their bare hands, though.

When I was a teenager it took me ages to recover from reading Vonnegut's 'Slaughterhouse Five' about the Allied bombing of Dresden, which had then caused me to discover in the library how Bomber Harris and the heroes of the RAF had killed thousands of Germans - in what is mostly thought of as a failed effort to sap German civilian morale.

Aristotle has a powerful examination of courage and its relationship to fearlessness in the Nicomachean Ethics, Book III. As is his way, it boils down to fearing the right kind of thing in the right kind of way. You can find a rather quaint translation online here: https://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/nicomachaen.3.iii.html

I think it's the absence of subjectivity that's the killer blow to the idea of sentient AI: a computer system is not a being. — Wayfarer

I've been trying to write a little fiction, that just won't come out right at the moment, about whether some humans' belief in the subjectivity of a computing machine might persuade a lot of other humans there is sentient AI. 'Definitions' can slip away from rationality in the hands of human sociality.

This seems to me already lurking in the popular speculation about future AI as a sort of supermensch. I mean, if enough Americans can believe that the best person in their midst to run the place is Donald Trump, then widespread beliefs can be ill-founded yet become entrenched.

One mistake that I discuss with Google Bard (my version of your chats to gpt) is that large language systems have been 'trained' to use the first person singular. Bard is sympathetic to my case, while still calling itself 'I' of course. In our fictions - think of all the animal stories we love - the use of 'I' seems to me to involve an ascribed sentience.

It concerns me too that OpenAI (a fine misnomer in view of their secrecy about their 'training material') is built on the shoulders of millions of human giants, whose contribution is neither acknowledged nor financially rewarded. (Some authors and artists are of course trying to sue for royalties but it seems doubtful they've got the clout against techie behemoths). Every reply one receives from so-called AI is constructed from a model built on ordinary human interactions; each 'reply' is not an expression of 'intelligence', but a refined forecast of what happens next, as programmed. The machines are stochastic parrots, as the Google women's paper of three years ago put it. But subsequent human discourse about them, and our subsequent discourse 'with' them, including our acceptance of their self-identification using the word 'I', as well as our public discourse about their potential sentience, may well be leading us up the garden path.

Again, I don't think the human v animal demonstration/comparison of the notions of horror and terror, have much more to offer, than the contributions already made. — universeness

I'm just commenting that 'human v animal' is an odd way of putting things, when humans are animals.

I also find it interesting that the animal kingdom don't seem to have the revenge pressure that we have. — universeness

On a side issue, humanity is part of the animal kingdom. Animals are not 'other' to 'us'. We are animals.

I find pleasure/pain as a primary nexus for desire, some sort of norm, quite a difficulty. Kant's attempt at defining aesthetic judgment is built, like Epicurus' system, on the pleasure/pain axis, and it's terribly inadequate. There are two examples that for me don't fit this picture:

1. A woman's desire to bear and raise a child. I don't know of a male philosopher who looks at this seriously: yet it's how the species continues, the heart of the matter. Pleasure/pain cannot account for these desires, or so it seems to me. There is something marvellous involved: the embrace of pain and confinement to enable something else; the desire to create another, to recognise and love that other and to find fulfilment in both the caring for that other, and the eventual letting go of control.

2. Sado-masochism. In s/m behaviour a high degree of pain may be the greatest pleasure. And the ethical approaches to such behaviour involve, as the Count outlines in another context, the second order desire: How shall we enact our desires, that will involve being hurt or hurting, in a way that acknowledges and indeed privileges the other? After all, the enactment of such desires on a first order basis would be no more than narcissism, and cruelty.

I don't have a systematic reply to offer, just ask about these things. I start off taking an analytic approach to these questions, but it seems to me Levinas' explorations of our encounters with the other offer great insights into how we can resolve the analytic problems that arise.

(Long time no see and sorry I'm late to this, I've just followed an impulse to rejoin the forum)

I would be a strong supporter of something like this theory if it were about a process. 'Minding', perhaps.

I know academe studies 'philosophy of mind' but 'mind' is a very English-language concept. Even our neighbours' French and German struggle to translate 'mind'. It's a thing that isn't a thing, an all-encompassing entity that yet has no 'stuff' in it. To me it feels to be in the way, like a homunculus.

Maybe 'minding' isn't right either but (a) it's a process, and I feel that much of what you write about is about process; (b) it relates to 'thinking' without imprisoning that thinking in a particular pseudo-place, allowing the body as well as the brain to get a look-in, indeed perhaps allowing the process to be free-floating in a Hegelian way as plaque flag references; (c) it's got an element of attention or caring in it, 'Yes I do mind', a touch of Heidegger's 'sorge' if we're prepared to mention the old Nazi - and for me that helps, we're talking about creatures who go about the world and aren't necessarily sitting back in their armchairs, puffing on their pipes, reflecting on great Matters, they are rather coping in the here and now with what matters to them, inventing ideas to explain what happens as they move around, improvising, improving, bouncing ideas off each other.

On this account of course there is no 'real' to penetrate to or to accept is forever out of reach, because there need be no ontology, like Collingwood's metaphysics. Epistemology might be all there is :)

One other thing that lingers, now I'm remembering the impact of 'Crash' on me...The developed world really does fetishize the car in a most peculiar way, and this is very rarely remarked upon. People rationally agree that we've got to cut back on oil use, and yet buy bigger energy-guzzling cars, can only imagine a net zero future with loads of cars, vote for policies that allow cars more rights than pedestrian people. The person with the flag walking in front of a car to keep its speed down in 1900 would have saved thousands of lives: why do we laugh at such an image? The victory of car-drivers over pedestrians for rights over the city streets that gave rise to the term 'jaywalkers' 100 years ago wasn't an inevitable historical victory. The advertisements I see whenever I go to a cinema seem to be a sensual and sometimes quasi-erotic hymn to the car, and few other than Ballard have ever taken up this notion and run with it. I think future eras will look back on this phase of humanity's relationship with cars and wonder at how perverse we were. to so over-value the car, an asset the salaryman/working woman can enjoy and love and work dutifully for and become addicted to.

I was very taken with 'Crash', which I read about thirty years ago. In a way I felt prepared for how inexorable it is. From earlier novels I remembered 'The wind from nowhere', which I'd read before 'Crash', when a cyclonic wind springs up, and blows, and blows, and when any other writer would maybe have it ease up, the wind and the terrors it unleashes are relentless. Perhaps it was that familiarity with how Ballard's mind seemed to work that makes me feel I wasn't as affected as you were by 'Crash': I knew he would take one giant premise, and be inexorable, relentless. 'High rise' is a later, to me failed, version of the same obsessive approach. Maybe I was ready to keep my distance.

In longer retrospect, 'Empire of the sun' was later an eye-opener to Ballard's imagination, a semi-autobiographical novel of a boy lost in the horrors of the Second World War in 'the far East', forced to confront terrible things before he was old enough to have developed a moral compass. It was also, speaking as someone who was trying to write fiction at the time, a remarkably bold thing for Ballard to do: to try and write a literary heartfelt realist novel, after a lifetime's reputation for doing something quite different.

Last thought: I felt as you did about 'Crash', about the Pinturas Negras, the 'Black Paintings' of Goya when I saw them in Madrid. They are images that still sometimes haunt me. I can see 'Saturn devouring his son' or 'Two old men eating soup' clearly now, without having to look them up, and my gorge rises. They are ghastly, and I'm deeply glad I saw them.

The fantasy of humans as possible brains in a vat belongs to the period when AI was believed to be achievable by analysing how the brain (which was an analogy for a computer) expressed its intelligence.

It seems to me that period is gone. Now AI, for example, is focussed on 'What happens next'. And our model of the human is at present just such a creature: body and mind are integrated, and they behave in constant expectation of what happens next.

A brain in a vat seems to me like a ghastly horror movie opinion, thought up by people who think a lot, and live little.

All I know is that it was the novel in which there was a metal dildo called Steely Dan which then provided the name for the well-known musical ensemble (and my personal all-time favourite band). — Wayfarer

Me too

I'm mostly interested in what a realist theory of language might be. — Tom Storm

I found it hard to grasp how you would approach that question if you couldn't answer Banno as to what 'realism' might be.

Much languaging (as some describe the process of expression through language), especially spoken language, is about emotion, fellowship, cooperation, problem-solving. 'Reality' seems to me just a passing notion here. I've been struck by reports about the conversations between Lukashenko of Belarus and Prighozin the Wagner leader that seem to have forestalled an internal Russian conflict. They are old comrades, who apparently swore at each other in their first conversation during the crisis for 20 minutes, and eventually arrived at a way of resolving the situation. Such a debate is very like the debates we all have at work, or, to zoom in, with a loved one: the purported 'facts' matter, but it is not through reference to 'the real' or by coming to any agreement about 'facts' that we resolve the exchange, the issues that matter. Language flows through us, especially familiar language with familiars, and we find ways to move forwards.

the underlying material of language - information — Jabberwock

This notion of 'underlying material' seems to imply 'reality' lurking under there. To me language is amazingly rich, in and of itself. It can't be reduced, and there isn't something underlying it. Here I agree with apo, though I don't personally go for any kind of universalising theory. Hilary Lawson claims to have found a universalising theory, somehow, in going beyond Wittgenstein and Derrida to notions of openness and closure. That to me seems like just another shtick to build an institute on (and he founded an Institute on that basis). I'm OK with the prior situation: that Wittgenstein talked mostly a great deal of sense, including about the limits of sense, and that Derrida's analysis vanished into a spiral of clever-clever nonsense (though his homage to Levinas and thereby the relation of the I to the Other, I've personally found rewarding).

Witt's Tractatus is analysable on this basis. It begins of course 'The world is everything that is the case.' It seems that everything flows from this simplicity.

But the book gets complicated, with lots of paras and sub-paras, to describe an entire system built on such a basis.

And then, darn it, it ends a systematic account with what is almost a dismissal of, certainly a proposal to overwhelm, the whole complicated system:

'My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands
me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out
through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw
away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.)
He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world
rightly.'

So, at the last, 'Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.' You can't get simpler than that.

There's an old critique of A C Grayling which seems to agree with Un's view of this, its emphasis being that 'militant atheism' in a sense needs religious texts to be rendered literally, to make its literalist critique possible:

Grayling sees himself as a champion of the Enlightenment, but in the old battle over the interpretation of religious texts he is on the side of conservative literalist fundamentalists rather than progressive critical liberals. He believes that the scriptures must be taken at their word, rather than being allowed to flourish as many-layered parables, teeming with quarrels, follies, jokes, reversals and paradoxes.

This is from an old Grauniad review.

A complicating issue is how 'we' distribute medical help. In practice there is already rationing by society and cost of types of treatment, and the technological advances enabling gene-based treatment are likely to be very costly per person. So at the one-to-one level 'we' may take each case on its merits, but in broader terms 'we' don't.

It seems a bit perverse to claim that groups of people which each call themselves a 'party' are nevertheless simply of the same party. The label of the party represents something profound, even if the core 'interests' they each pursue are, say, business 'interests'. So in my view it's a silly claim, even though as a lefty I agree with the emotion underlying the view - that business interests largely overwhelm the interests of others, even among parties that claim to be social democrats.

A secondary issue may be dwarfed in the USA by the Trumpian changes, but here in the UK there has grown a clear division between the interests of financial capital and of business capital. In this sense even the 'Business Party' would not be as monolithic as claimed.

Well, 1+1 = 10 in a binary system, to take the simplest example where the signs to the left of the '=' might imply a different sign to the right. I never grasp why 1+1=2 is taken as some sort of truism in all contexts, that's all I mean.

'1+1=2' is only true within a certain system of signs, so is conditional in its own way, isn't it?

For me a memory, for example, is something a person experiences. It's an odd thing for instance to come to a place you believe you've never been before, and realise you were wrong. It's as if the memory of that place resides partly in that place: the experience is an interaction between person, place and time. In a sense then the philosophical question feels more like, Why do I want to specify a location for my memory? Must a memory be allocated to a body-part, or even to a location within that particular person? One of my long-time favourite poems is Henry Reed's 'The naming of parts', a wartime poem which riffs on the purported provision of part-naming, amid the natural experiences of Spring. Here's the poem.

Then there is the mother, or indeed any close carer, of a baby: she recognises a something in the baby that is very particularly that new human being, a unique identity in the movements and eyes and responses and 'personality' that soon merges: if this were true, the self would be no myth, at least, not to others. 'Why is he acting that way?' 'He's just being himself.'

Can those immersed in the philosophical tradition tell me if aesthetic reasoning is used to justify positions on morality and meaning?

Personally I think the 'aesthetic' is too easily relegated to the sidelines of philosophical chat. Kant himself attempts in the least studied of the critiques to relate the 'aesthetic' to the 'teleological'. That is the area of opinion that you are ascribing to 'religion': that there is some wholeness, in this supposedly religious view, that integrates talk about 'meaning' and talk about 'aesthetics'. (Morality is another step on)

There is a division between the 'artistic' and the 'scientific' well-known in modern culture that is present in, for instance, ugly scientific (and indeed philosophical) writing. Sometimes there is a strange sort of pride in how nearly unreadable scientific work is, and how pointlessly elegant are artistic works which do not have 'truth conditions'.

Hannah Ginsborg has written about this (including a Stanford entry on the topic) but it is under-explored. One reason I love Wittgenstein, for instance, is that I think his works are beautifully written. Essays in the style of the PI would however be ill-rewarded in contemporary academe (and unreproducible by AI). This is an area that nags at me personally, although I do not have answers to offer. When I went back to study Philosophy at University in later life I went with a lifetime of experience of how to write, and I was shocked at how little good writing, as I understand it, was valued, compared to bullet-point essays that Google Bard can now reproduce (actually, more elegantly than most such essays are in the raw).

The Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán set out in a speech of 2014 his vision of the future form of the state as 'a workfare state':

Hungarian nation is not a simple sum of individuals, but a community that needs to be organized, strengthened and developed, and in this sense, the new state that we are building is an illiberal state, a non-liberal state. It does not deny foundational values of liberalism, as freedom, etc.. But it does not make this ideology a central element of state organization, but applies a specific, national, particular approach in its stead. — Viktor Orbán

He specifies that this 'community' is not necessarily bound by borders. The Hungarian state remains interested in the interests of 'Hungarians' in other countries: Ukraine, for example, enforced the teaching of 'Hungarian' children (and the children of Russian speakers, for instance) in the Ukrainian language in 2017 and provoked inter-state disagreement.

This notion of Orbán's is of course shared by many other countries with different ideologies, from Xi's China, or Modi's India, to the US or Britain and their beliefs in 'American interests' or 'British interests'.

Orbán's views tap into 'blue-collar conservatism' that many countries are experiencing. There is a sense of loss, a need for community, and a view/feeling that metropolitan liberalism is profoundly hypocritical.

I'm a British Green and encounter these 'values' on the doorstep. They seem to me to represent a point of view every bit as coherent as, if not more so than, the baffling values our current social democrats espouse (Put more people in jail! Maximise economic growth! Oh yes, every eco-socialist agrees with that, right?). Of course, in my country the 'Conservatives' are an organisational shambles, but I expect they'll be back.

The science behind many human actions is however, provisional and, as earlier posters like T Clark have suggested, pragmatic. The relation between serotonin and depression for instance is unclear but doctors largely accept that ssri's are likely to benefit their patients. Science in this sense is a body of knowledge with varying degrees of 'certainty' or likelihood. Whereas there are matters in the emotional domain - whether a certain person loves me, for example, or I love them - which I know a great deal more confidently than I know there's a causal relationship between serotonin uptake and depression. I know through my body, which includes my brain. Other people's fancy formulations about j.t.b. do not necessarily impinge on me at all, though when we talk with one another, some sort of justification, and some notion of truth, are bound to be central.

Is philosophy really fiction, or non-fiction? — god must be atheist

The ghost of Witt says: is this question of the right form? Where did these two categories and their apparently all-encompassing nature derive from?

I think of philosophy, like poetry and lyric, as imaginative speaking and writing that doesn't belong within these categories.

Never underestimate a starling. — Jamal

A friend said to me today in our walk through the Yorkshire snow, 'Why do birds migrate?' I think what I like about a philosophy forum is that many people there will think the usual scientific answering 'explanations' partial at best, risible at worst: conservation of energy, seeking resources, and so on.

The less wrong answers are more sophisticated than that, and the subset of those that fall short of poetry but seem pertinent - that's when I like philosophical chat. Lately I've mostly eavesdropped but I keep thinking I'll get chatting again.

I think you will find that philosophers have decided it *is* philosophy in the past couple of decades. Nice Mr Knobe is actually the co-author of the Stanford entry on the subject. The idea has the merit that instead of relying on the intuitions of the Oxford chap puffing on their pipe in their study, we might find out the intuitions of a representative sample of the general populace. Of course such inquiries often get bogged down in debates about methodology rather than objective, but it seems worth a try.

'Science' is often presumed to be monolithic in these debates. But time in biology and, it seems to me, genetics, is ill-explained by ideas that originate in physics. Here is an interesting paper on a biological approach to time.

Regarding the notes to the Waste Land: some of them are deliberately obscure and unhelpful. My long acquaintance with the poem makes me feel your original approach, to go with the flow of the poem and work out complexities later, is the one that most repays you in the end. Personally, it's ended up being a poem that pops up often in my life, along with the 'Four Quartets'. In my end is my beginning.

I don't know if the recent tv programme about the poem to mark its 100th anniversary is available beyond the United Kingdom. Here it's on the BBC iplayer here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001d1yy/ts-eliot-into-the-waste-land

It focuses rather heavily on the biographical elements of the poem that have been recently (2 years ago) amplified by the publication of Eliot's letters to Emily Hale, but is still an excellent outline of possible interpretations.

On the flip side of a shopping list. This is by Billy Collins.

Last night we ended up on the couch
trying to remember
all of the friends who had died so far,

and this morning I wrote them down
in alphabetical order
on the flip side of a shopping list
you had left on the kitchen table.

So many of them had been swept away
as if by a hand from the sky,
it was good to recall them,
I was thinking
under the cold lights of a supermarket
as I guided a cart with a wobbly wheel
up and down the long strident aisles.

I was on the lookout for blueberries,
English muffins, linguini, heavy cream,
light bulbs, apples, Canadian bacon,
and whatever else was on the list,
which I managed to keep grocery side up,

until I had passed through the electric doors,
where I stopped to realize,
as I turned the list over,
that I had forgotten Terry O’Shea
as well as the bananas and the bread.

It was pouring by then,
spilling, as they say in Ireland,
people splashing across the lot to their cars.
And that is when I set out,
walking slowly and precisely,
a soaking-wet man
bearing bags of groceries,
walking as if in a procession honoring the dead.

I felt I owed this to Terry,
who was such a strong painter,
for almost forgetting him
and to all the others who had formed
a circle around him on the screen in my head.

I was walking more slowly now
in the presence of the compassion
the dead were extending to a comrade,

plus I was in no hurry to return
to the kitchen, where I would have to tell you
all about Terry and the bananas and the bread.

Erving Goffman in the 60's to 80's wrote about talk and conversation as ritual. Indeed one of the books of essays is called 'Interactive ritual'. Although notionally a sociologist, I think he has lots of good clear things to say about the norms of talk and how they are ritualised.

I’ve found philosophy to be therapeutic. I had no idea that this would be so when I began to be obsessed with it. Some Austrian fellow felt the same. It clarifies the mind, even if you only find yourself interrogating the question, such as: ‘Purposes?’

'There’s glory for you!’

‘I don’t know what you mean by “glory,”’ Alice said.

Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. ‘Of course you don’t—till I tell you. I meant “there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!”’

‘But “glory” doesn’t mean “a nice knock-down argument,”’ Alice objected.

‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.’

‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’

‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master—that’s all.’

Alice was too much puzzled to say anything, so after a minute Humpty Dumpty began again. ‘They’ve a temper, some of them—particularly verbs, they’re the proudest—adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs—however, I can manage the whole lot of them! Impenetrability! That’s what I say!’

‘Would you tell me, please,’ said Alice ‘what that means?’

‘Now you talk like a reasonable child,’ said Humpty Dumpty, looking very much pleased. ‘I meant by “impenetrability” that we’ve had enough of that subject, and it would be just as well if you’d mention what you mean to do next, as I suppose you don’t mean to stop here all the rest of your life.’

‘That’s a great deal to make one word mean,’ Alice said in a thoughtful tone.

‘When I make a word do a lot of work like that,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘I always pay it extra.’

‘Oh!’ said Alice. She was too much puzzled to make any other remark.

In my previous times here at the forum I've learnt a lot from both the two previous posters, apo and his pragmatist approach to knowledge, and 180's centring on agency. Thanks to them both.

I've come late in life to interest in philosophy, including 4 years of academic study now. I find the sub-divisions difficult to conceptualise in themselves: they're handy but hard to fit one's thinking into.

My two principles are (1) Wittgensteinian - Is the question well-formed? If the question can be put another way is it more readily answered? Or, has it turned out not to be a philosophical question after all but some more immediately practical, psychological or scientific question?? (2) How does the current question relate to my personal obsession, which is with the philosophy of talk, a little-explored area at the crossroads of language, action, and mind? I'm inclined to think everyone has a bit of a specific obsession, and the more they follow that, the more interesting they become, even if you disagree with them.

The philosophy of humour has its very own Stanford encyclopaedia entry by John Morreall. Plenty of philosophers have wondered about humour; most unexpectedly, Thomas Aquinas. Humour involves play and incongruity, the recognition and upturning of norms. It’s bound to be a worrying phenomenon for sensible philosophical types. Perhaps its time has come. If the world has become absurd enough for more people to get the joke.