Newsletter: February 2023

Reflecting on the religious conflicts of his time, Zera Yacob resolved to use reason to determine which aspects of these religious traditions did indeed derive from God and which were the inventions of contentious humans.

[Reflections] The Predicament of not Living Your Own Life

The idea that your life as a whole can feel wrong is a particular kind of suffering. This blog post offers some reflections on this kind of suffering.

Newsletter: January 2023

Starting with Plato, philosophy has systematically marginalized both literature and animals as beneath the dignity that philosophy has established for humankind.

[Starting Points] Effective Altruism and SBF

My character is shaped by the people around me and the prevailing norms of my culture. If I throw myself into a line of work in which profit maximization overrides all other interests, I’m unlikely to be unchanged by the experience.

Newsletter: December 2022

How are animals of the same species subjected to such different treatments? Part of the answer, I think, is that we humans don’t quite know what to make of creatures that are both so similar to us and so different.

[Reflections] I didn’t choose to write this blog post

When I try to picture what the determinist is telling me, I see myself in something like an x-ray view, a shadowy skull balanced on a skeleton, wiggling its jaw or moving about, but with the “person” absent.

Newsletter: November 2022

Humour and horror both provoke surprise by confounding our ordinary way of making sense of things. But humour creates an atmosphere of absolute safety and horror creates an atmosphere of absolute danger.

[Starting Points] Critical Thinking Calls for Critical Feeling

Critical thinking has an important dispositional element. You need to feel the right way about a problem if you’re going to think well about it.

Newsletter: October 2022

Maybe true freedom lies not in being free from all obstacles but in imposing the right obstacles—that is, the ones that channel you in the direction you want or need to go.

[Reflections] Why Does the History of Philosophy Matter to Philosophy?

By situating my own thinking within a broader historical tradition, I can see more clearly how my particular concerns and preoccupations are mine rather than just the objectively and timelessly important ones that all people with philosophical inclinations might turn themselves to.