Category: Philosophy

  • dispensable and scarce

    Just a quick subtweetish sort of blog post, here, to note that the more times people start an essay or article or academic paper or blog post with a phrase along the lines of “[d]igital platforms and the online services that they provide have become an indispensable and ubiquitous part of modern lifestyles, mediating our…

  • epistemic humility vs. “the engineer’s disease”

    This post is prompted in part by a post by Cennydd Bowles, in which he riff on Nathan Ballantyne’s notion of epistemic trespass. Reading it reminded me of a term I’ve seen frequently, most often on MetaFilter, where it has been part of the lexiconic furniture for some time. An ask-the-hive-mind entry on that site…

  • epistemic seismology

    The always insightful Ryan Oakley wrestles with reality: Some stories may seem more true than others, some more pleasing, and others more dangerous, but no matter how true, beautiful or deadly, they are stories. Our reality is woven from stories –tales invented by readers just as much as authors– and our personalities are only stories…

  • Solnit’s hope vs. Arendt’s natality

    Rebecca Solnit’s definition of hope is so succinct a summary of my own definition that I assume I must have picked it up from her (and from others who got it from the same source). This version is from a new interview at LARB, which I’m stashing here so I can cite it properly going…

  • feral empiricism

    Not sure if the title term is Mark Carrigan’s own coining, here—it seems to be a g**glewhack, so maybe it is?—but I like it enough that I’m stashing it here, with some of the material for context: The phrase “do your research!” is ubiquitous across the subcultures which have popped up amidst platform capitalism’s epistemic…