Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

  I wrote rather much about day-to-day political matters last week.  Let us work our way out of it.  Today I will take up a political matter with an odd philosophical twist.  Tomorrow, I'll ask a philosophically freighted question about political history.  To begin with an oddity: the Secretary of Health has now sworn to a very strange account of why he fired a subordinate. Secy Kennedy says that he asked her, "Are you trustworthy?" and she replied, "No."  So he had to fire her. I'm curious whether anyone in the world believes this story.  First: who says in earnest (not by way of posing a hypothetical) that she is "not trustworthy"? Untrustworthy people generally desirous of keeping their jobs seek to pretend to be trustworthy just as liars pretend to be sincere.  Saying "I am untrustworthy" seems a very odd way of quitting. Why not just use the old standby, "I quit"?  Anyway, this hypothetical "yes" in response to th...

 For fans of the original Star Trek .  Let us remember for a fleeting moment an episode in which Captain Kirk, with some help, defeats a robot that had been holding him prisoner. In part at least this victory is won by telling the robot "I am a liar." The paradox is too much, the robot blows its fuses, and Kirk gets back to his ship.  This is of course a tight version of the old Cretan paradox. The original version was just "All Cretans are liars" spoken by a Cretan. Not much of a paradox at all, actually.  And St. Paul makes a brief reference to it without mentioning its paradoxical nature.   There are lots and lots of Cretans.  For any one Cretan to say "we're such a lying bunch" is not paradoxical. It may seem like to speaker is giving himself too much credit as a supposed exception to that generalization: still, no paradox.  A Cretan might even say " all Cretans are liars" and be considered to have spoken hyperbolically.  Perhaps a commun...