Newsletter: November 2025

If you’ve recently encountered zombies and ghosts, werewolves, vampires, and swamp creatures, you may have been out on the streets with trick-or-treaters. Or maybe you were in a philosophy seminar.

Newsletter: October 2025

LLMs are Plato’s worst nightmare. All the dangers he perceives in the written word take on monstrous new form in algorithms that churn out oceans of text, arranging fine-seeming phrases that not only lack any genuine commitment to the truth but that don’t even have a conception of reality to which they might try to be faithful.

Newsletter: September 2025

You’re probably familiar with the saying the coward dies a thousand deaths, but the brave die only once. It sounds great but I think there’s something to be said for dying a thousand deaths. The imaginative person lives a thousand lives and the unimaginative only one.

Newsletter: August 2025

While pre-Avicennan philosophy was largely commentary on Aristotle, post-Avicennan philosophy often took Avicenna himself to be the central figure of philosophy with whom one had to engage, either in agreement or disagreement.

Newsletter: July 2025

Seeing myself from a physiological point of view deepens my sense of what it means to be a human animal and how my mind is entangled with complex processes that lie deep beneath the level of conscious awareness.

Newsletter: June 2025

When engaging with a fictional story, we can happily imagine worlds that are factually very different from our own. Science fiction, fantasy, utopian and dystopian fiction: all of these present no significant hurdle to the imagination. But we seem to strongly resist imagining worlds that are morally very different from our own.

Newsletter: May 2025

Spinoza’s Ethics is a passionate and radical revisioning of the nature of God, human existence, and the world that comes packaged as if it were a coldly rational geometric proof.

Newsletter: April 2025

Sentimental artworks, and the people who indulge in them, are disappointingly incurious about the emotions involved. If the emotions are rational, and if they inform our thinking and deliberation, they warrant critical scrutiny every bit as much as thought does.

Newsletter: March 2025

The peculiar predicament of philosophy, according to Wittgenstein, is that we speak under the illusion that we’re making sense when in fact we’re mouthing empty words. The illusion of saying something profound is beguiling, which is why puncturing it, as he sees it, requires strength of character more than it requires intellect.

Newsletter: February 2025

An ethics that recognizes the centrality of trust emphasizes our vulnerability and our interdependence. It also emphasizes the importance of discretion in our dealings with one another.