Category: Philosophy

  • political problems cannot be solved on the aesthetic level

    After getting irked by reviews of Oppenheimer, Adam Kotsko wrote a short thing that feels to me like it’s the missing piece to that Sam Kriss essay I excerpted last week, which has been—as the kids say—living rent-free in my head ever since. Kotsko has an interesting and very valuable insight into “culture war” stuff,…

  • if we can honestly acknowledge the conditions, then maybe we can do something better

    A couple of days back, a listserv that I’m signed up to delivered the first example of a thing I’d heard whsipers of from others: an invitation to a seminar aimed at teaching academics how to use the new crop of LLMs to make the writing of grant applications more “efficient”. This caused me to…

  • the pursuit of absolute predictability renders its practitioners foolish

    A conference paper transcript from Terence Blake, in which he smashes together Deleuze and Dune, which results in a much more interesting (and far less reductive) reading of the latter than I’ve seen heretofore. A snippet: Frank Herbert indicates that the « central paradox » of Dune turns on the human perception of time. Paul’s prescience first…

  • solar matter stomache-ache

    So it seems I got a rise out of Matt Webb with my response to his “eating the sun” thing a week or so back. This was not exactly my intention—I had little expectation he’d actually read the thing, tbh—but I’m kinda pleased, for reasons which I’m going to try to explain here, as much…

  • species traitor (and proud of it)

    I admire Matt Webb in a lot of ways, but I’m also aware that we come at the world from very different positions. This post clarifies and specifies that difference: Ought we take sides? Like: if you’re not all in on eating the Sun for its total energy output to drive the turbines of humanity in a…