North Texas gets a bad rap for not having the towering mountain peaks or lush verdant woodlands of regions further west or east, but every pocket prairie is stunning throughout April and May

Texas' newest state park, in the northernmost stretch of the Hill Country (Palo Pinto County)

"Before social media, academia was more civil and scholars didn't get into so many stupid fights." Eminent sociologists in 1912:

Interesting intellectual history or genealogy of the intertwined development of "religion" and "society" as explananda / explanantia c. 1890-1910 in the work of Tylor, Durkheim, Simmel, and Webber.

This painting, a 1927 piece by the Swiss-German artist Paul Klee, is called Limits of Reason (also known as Grenzen des Verstandes, or The Bounds of the Intellect).

"If we thought with things instead of abstract marks, and expressed the nature of these things instead of arbitrary signs: then farewell to error and opinion, for we should find ourselves in the land of truth."

Happy Easter!

Project Hail Mary (novel): Hey isn't it fun watching me solve math problems & ace science lab? Oh snap, now I'm in outer space and my audience is dead. Ah, but what have we here? My own alien auditor who's handy enough to make my experiments work but computer-illiterate enough to be impressed by me

it's probably this way

Plato's mirror metaphor in the Republic helps us think about screens wherein AI mimics phenomena without the artist's mediating hand. Menander's theatrical machine, which resolved narrative tensions through divine intervention, parallels how machine learning short-circuits human creative processes.

Plato's mirror metaphor in the Republic helps us think about screens wherein AI mimics phenomena without the artist's mediating hand. Menander's theatrical machine, which resolved narrative tensions through divine intervention, parallels how machine learning short-circuits human creative processes.

Livestream this Friday/Saturday. Keynotes and invited speakers. YouTube.com/@NTPAMedia Keynotes: Peg Birmingham, DePaul; Alejandro Vallega, University of Oregon

Spring in Tyler State Park (northeast Texas)

In a sense, the ongoing DHS/CPB/ICE attempt to disappear people into detention facilities without making any formal criminal charges is an attempt to close a door to the legal recognition of one's personhood identified by Hannah Arendt: (The following quote is from The Origins of Totalitarianism):

A Peregrination in Gabriel Marcel’s Phenomenology of Hope A paper presented that the South Carolina Society for Philosophy & North Carolina Philosophical Society Joint Conference (Furman University, 13-14 March, 2026) As the “existentialist wave” gradually faded into the popular memory of the…

I've enjoyed 2 days of thought-provoking conversations at Furman during the joint gathering of the North Carolina Philosophical Society & the South Carolina Society for Philosophy. Research comes alive at the moment of live questioning - a vivacity that evades capture in writing.

Moundville Archaeological Park, near Tuscaloosa. This Mississippian city flourished on the banks of the Black Warrior from about the 1100s AD until about the time of DeSoto's entrada into Alabama in 1541-42.

Strategy is fundamentally all about developing a sophisticated theory of the mind of one’s opponent. With MAGA’s Iran Adventure, guess we’re going to see what a modern war almost totally devoid of anything we’d call “strategy” looks like.

recovering from a bath

Power went out all over campus, so I'm reduced to taking notes on the geology lecture being given by this squirrel

it's Pick Your Fighter day in Texas The U.S. is in a mess, but there are small concrete things you can do, and helping choose who will be on the ballot in November is one of them

Sappho showed up unexpectedly at the local bookstore

good evening

"The world of fear and desire... is the kingdom of technics... Every technology serves, or can be made to serve, some desire or some fear; conversely, every desire as every fear tends to invent its own technique. [here follows a thread from Gabriel Marcel's 1933 reflections on technology...]

Weekend reading and drafting

Nature is considering whether it might like to Spring

Historians: It's too early to fear replacement by Google AI's NotebookLM. To test its potential mettle in the archives, I asked it to transcribe a specific passage of old-fashioned French cursive. It initially responded by "lying," i.e. transcribing a different passage - something easier... 1/2)

Should I be concerned that the registration screen for this philosophy conference is the storm-tossed Angel of History who "sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet" -- and is it a problem that I am the past that he is helplessly contemplating?

"To love anybody is to expect something from him/her, something which can neither be defined nor foreseen; it is at the same time to make it possible for him/her to fulfil this expectation. [continued, 1/3] - Gabriel Marcel, "A Metaphysic of Hope" (1942), tr. Emma Craufurd

Connemara Meadow Nature Preserve

“Language leads us to a thought which is no longer ours alone, to a thought which is presumptively universal, though this is never the universality of a pure concept which would be identical for every mind." Merleau-Ponty, c. 1952, continued... (1/3)

Merleau-Ponty, in "A Note on Machiavelli" (Tr. Richard McCleary), expounds on the famous dictum that "the Prince must make himself feared in such a way that, if he is not loved, he is at least not hated": "There is no power which has an absolute basis. .... (1/5)

Minerva's owl is ice-bound

True as far as it goes, but the mystical screeching side of philosophy has empirical results to show for itself, too: centuries' worth of artworks, literary traditions, and reasons to get out of bed in the morning

A Minneapolis Manifesto

The white stuff is mostly packed ice crystals (doesn't even show foot / paw prints) and you can see a gray squirrel outlined on this backdrop for a country mile, so if anyone is planning to walk their large dog in North Texas this morning, I'd recommend shoes with a good grip

What will end first: the ambient ice storm or my reading of Peter Wilson's chunky history of the Holy Roman Empire?

The what? (offender: The Extinction of Experience, by Christine Rosen -- not, apparently, an acolyte of the Qoheleth)

I wrote about what is happening during America's 250th year with the help of a book published during its 75th. renaissanceanimal.com/2026/01/20/s...

I wrote about what is happening during America's 250th year with the help of a book published during its 75th. renaissanceanimal.com/2026/01/20/s...

I'm going to have to study Nahuatl, aren't I

Hadn't looked at the news for 72 hours because I was in the final sprint to finish a paper that we hope to present at a conference in - of all places - Copenhagen, Denmark, so now that I have made the mistake of informing myself on world events.... What does one even say?

Prompting AI to write about a particular thing will never replace me prompting my brain to write about a particular thing and then my brain writing about something completely and utterly different

For comparison, here's Czechoslovakian President Emil Hácha arriving in Berlin, March 1939

"Each act of philosophical or literary expression contributes to fulfilling the vow to retrieve the world that was taken away with the first appearance of a language, (1/2)

The newest issue of History and Theory, calling for "philology now," brings to mind James Turner's excellent book on the philological ladder that the humanities once climbed up and, in some cases, then cast away. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/14682303...

porchlight on a Monday night with a critter whose mental model of the world does not include [ ]

Asking about phronēsis in relation to artificially intelligent agents, as Sullins does here, seems to me a crucial, if oft-overlooked, question. John P. Sullins. "Artificial Phronesis: What It Is and What It Is Not" (2021) academic.oup.com/book/41621/c...

Wæs se grimma gæst Grendel haten, mære mearcstapa, se þe moras heold, fen ond fæsten; fifelcynnes eard wonsæli wer weardode hwile, siþðan him scyppend forscrifen hæfde in Caines cynne.

Joint statement by 4 former officials in Democratic and Republican Administrations—including four NATO Ambassadors, 3 Assistant Secretaries of State for Europe, and 3 NSC Senior Directors. Excellent opening in particular.