"La justice est l'acte de rendre à chacun sa part de dignité." "Justice is the act of rendering unto each their portion of dignity." - Gabriel Marcel, unpublished manuscript (1944)

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.

« Dès demain commencera l’ère nouvelle. La poésie n’existera plus, on brisera les lyres trop lourdes pour les vieilles inspirations. On massacrera les poètes. »

Behold Grackle the Great, howling at the morning moon

Here endeth winter vacation.

Happy New Year! (Bentsen - Rio Grande Valley State Park)

"After all, what could be more superfluous than art...?...Art is more than... [entertainment or self-expression].... In fact,... art is the only truly effective means we have of engaging, in a communal context, the psyche on its own terms." ~ J.F. Martel

Moonlight

Time to see if my brain still functions after all the holiday revelry

Holiday cheer

Merry Christmas!

atop Gloss Mountain (northwestern Oklahoma)

Uwe Wittstock's Marseille 1940: The Flight of Literature has just been translated into English by Daniel Bowles (Polity Press)

Here, on a snowy late November day in 1868, Custer's 7th Cavalry attacked Black Kettle's sleeping Cheyenne people camped along the Washita River in what is today western Oklahoma. Black Kettle, a survivor of the Sand Creek massacre 4 years prior, was killed, along with his wife.

Not particularly a Larry McMurtry fan (growing up in Laredo inoculates one against the Streets of Laredo), but the man was also a collector and bookseller. The book accumulation in here is magnificent and worth checking out, in the unlikely event you are anywhere near Archer City

"Un algorithme conventionnel - qui d'ailleurs n'a de sens que rapporté au langage - n'exprimera jamais que la Nature sans l'homme. Il n'y a donc pas à la rigueur de signes conventionnels, simple notation d'une pensée pure et claire pour elle-même, ...

The walk after final grades for all one's students have been submitted

"As 'generative' AI has entered the realm of culture, the question of whether these systems optimize well, whether they perform to benchmarks, no longer seems satisfactory. We have to know what these systems *mean*." ~ Leif Weatherby, Language Machines

"Not many general readers can grasp the intricacies of German Idealism, but everyone knows what it means to have a white poodle called Atma die and to replace it with a brown poodle of the same name, as Schopenhauer did[.]" Eagleton on Woods' new Schopenhauer biography: lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/…

Recycled Books Denton, Texas

Over on the Bloomsbury website, there are Black Friday savings on Baudelaire's Bitter Metaphysics (still expensive, but authors don't make the rules) www.bloomsbury.com/us/baudelair...

Happy Thanksgiving!

The "commemoration" (i.e., building that is way too speculative to be a replica or reconstruction) marking the general vicinity (but not the exact spot) of San Francisco de los Tejas...

It’s publication day! Spread the word. The perfect Christmas gift for the pessimist in your life.

November morning

huge ty to everyone supporting the Substudies project, & in that spirit i finally finished the translation drafts i started a while back of Adorno-Benjamin’s joint critical (incredibly catty lol) “reports” for Horkheimer on 3 Paris conferences in early August ‘37! open.substack.com/pub/jamescra...

An early imperial Roman lamp and a 5th-century Greek wine pitcher, both sparkling with personality ~ Detroit Institute of Arts ~

Good times at the Society for United States Intellectual History conference in Detroit. I'll be talking tomorrow about AI-generated/influenced documents in the historical archives of the future

Ahead of a conference in Detroit, while hanging out in Windsor I came across Biblioasis, a particularly excellent bookstore. It's got a thoughtfully curated selection of new books as a front for a glorious chaos of used books on the back shelves

From Occupied Paris to New York, 1943: Benjamin Fondane and the Partisan Review – Renaissance Animal renaissanceanimal.com/2023/05/13/f...