'When the student above says, "I don't know," he is not saying, then, that he has nothing to say. He is saying that he is not in a position to carry on this discussion. And so we are addressed as apprentices rather than as teachers or scholars. To speak to us as a person of status or privilege, the writer can either speak to us in our terms—in the privileged language of university discourse—or, in default (or in defiance), he can speak to us as though we were children, offering us the wisdom of experience.'

On the way to a Humean theory of the categories

'They don't know about the volta. Lacking this knowledge, why should they persist?'

As slow as possible

'… the actual dialectical challenge here is whether you, as an asker of a question, are then capable of subjecting yourself to the answer you find.'

'Rousseau's sovereign assemblies are neither spaces of robust public deliberation and debate on matters of common concern, nor are they sites for the aggregation of individual preferences; they are not raucous public meetings dominated by popular orators, nor are they occasions of plebiscitary acclamation. Rousseau's sovereign assemblies have been thought by some to echo the collective assemblies of the ancient world, and Rousseau himself continually turns to Roman examples to orient his reader, but they have little precedent in political theory's previous descriptions of the role and function of popular assembly in political life. The enigma or "oddness" of Rousseau's sovereign assemblies is based first and foremost in the fact that they are envisioned as not only solemn but largely silent; that is, as spaces not of ratio-critical deliberation or passionate public oratory, so much as of the "mute eloquence" of a largely silent and absorbed collective.'

'… after one has long imposed silence on it, to recall it is not the business of a moment.'

Duncan Law on traditional and critical theory

A downpour.