teaching the bit of _philosophical explanations_ about the meaningfulness of life this week and i am yet again struck by how unfortunate it is that nozick was largely pigeonholed as the anarchy state and utopia guy

because my adhd is too powerful instead of continuing on my current fantasy project i started a new one

this is an interesting paper but its framing (that davidson introduced the principle of charity) is just mistaken philpapers.org/rec/VERTSA-19

the original one punch man

It Begins

grading a student essay and they appear to have lifted a few passages, with cosmetic adjustments and no attribution, from a journal article one of MY OWN ARTICLES

we like being persnickety don't we folks, it's our favorite thing to be (pardon the typos)

interested in hearing great big nerds nerds talk about spinoza next year? you're in luck, check out the line-up!

almost as much as ethics, the treatise on the emendation of the intellect just endlessly rewards re-reading and re-returning to it

in an unexpected but welcome development, i got to translate a (very) little virgil for my spinoza book (a bit from the georgics)

broke: the norman conquest shows the superiority of french over english martial prowess woke: the norman conquest shows that not even the yoke can suppress albion forever bespoke: the norman conquest shows that, ultimately, the only way to conquer england is to be a norseman

if you had told little fresher bourbaki ``physics is the study of different sorts of lagrangians'' he would've laughed however,

tutoring electrodynamics has been a fun way to return to the subject forgot how much i liked it!

gm lads

you must be hobbit-travel-maxxing

how your email finds me

richard ``the dick'' cheney dead at 84

chapter one of my novel is now in something approaching a legible first draft, so you can read it here if you like: open.substack.com/pub/emending...

pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field

gm lads

curious

stuff like this makes the job feel worthwhile

analytic social philosophy? oh, you mean feminist apologetics?

regular reminder that spinoza not only believed in precognition, but he both gave an account of what precognition is in his philosophical system and gave specific circumstances under which precognition can occur see ep. 17 to pieter balling:

have just completed a >3500 word journal referee report be the change you wish to see

how's y'alls evening lads

gonna be interviewed in a few weeks for the ``history of philosophy without any gaps'' podcast; i'm gonna talk a little bit about spinoza but mostly about the role of learned societies, learned correspondence, and journals in the rise of the new science in the seventeenth century fun times!

huzzah! my paper ``spinoza on teleology, action, and explanatory overdetermination'' is out, open access, at ppq! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

fuck it we ball

what i love about this passage is that it (maybe inadvertently) takes the idea of logic as being not just the science of inference but the art of right judgment very seriously also the implicit leibnizian rationalism, that helps too

no more epistemic mad libs society has progressed beyond the need for epistemic mad libs

my most tinfoil movie take is that ``man of steel'' is a loose adaptation and critique of republic

new gettier case: guy who believes that epstein killed himself because a prison guard there that night told him so, and epstein did kill himself, but only because the guards gave epstein the option between suicide and death by torture

slowly morphing into a taller, dumber, hairier tom wolfe

rip ozzy

huzzah! my Big Damn PSR Paper is now out online and open access! read and accept the leibnizian gospel into your hearts! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

afternoon lads

back on my bullshit (writing poetry) open.substack.com/pub/emending...

every single time i have any interaction with any level of the british state it happens with such an infuriating combination of total indifference to my concerns and unresponsive nonchalant incompetence that i cannot fathom having to put up with this for *years*

i could: (i) finish the contracted monograph i'm already working on (ii) start a completely new book proposal for an insanely ambitious book reader you will never guess which i've chosen

when i say ``i should legally be allowed to hunt the two or three people blasting their music so loudly that i am forced to hear it through my open windows on the 19th floor of my building for sport,'' i'm not saying i would, just that i'd like the option

controversial take maybe but i think the best cinematic take on superman would be an adaptation of ``for tomorrow'' the fundamental problem with superman is that there are very few villains who can go toe to toe with him (darkseid, lobo, zod, maybe a few others)

well i guess my days on this app are numbered now; lemme know if you want to stay in contact

broke: real numbers are dedekind cuts woke: real numbers are equivalence classes of limit-identical cauchy sequences of rationals bespoke: real numbers are the eigenvalues of all linear transformations on the basis vector of a one-dimensional vector space

this was my cousin if you're the praying kind, do say a prayer for her