A perfect table of contents.

James Scott.

A stunningly beautiful initial depicting a dying man in bed with his soul being taken up by an angel. From a copy of Aristotle’s De Anima, likely copied at Oxford c. 1260. @theulspeccoll.bsky.social since 1715, MS Ee.2.31.

Christopher Walken.

150 years ago you could get random observations of your baby published in Mind. Indisputably the most famous person to ever publish there—guess who!

Unless your multiverse has endless hells lurking in the triangular gaps between worlds, I don't buy it.

Regret calibration.

Very sad to learn today that Yanyou—the founder of Jiazazhi, the Chinese photo book publisher and bookstore—was arrested in June and is still being held. There is a small note about it in this AP story. #china

The magic spell hypothesis: just as magic spells are written distinctively to make them appear special, so legal language is made complex in order to signal a special kind of authority. See: doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

why would you use chatgpt to simulate an endless tedious argument with various professional philosophers when we already have the daily nous comment section?

Shibata Zeshin, Monkey Posing as a Collector, 1835. Justin Sun posing with Maurizio Cattelan, Comedian, 2019.

Two excellent new articles on the cultural wasteland produced by corporate streaming— @tavlin.bsky.social on Netflix: www.nplusonemag.com/issue-49/ess... and @lizpelly.bsky.social on Spotify: harpers.org/archive/2025...

An 18-chapter volume on Levels of Explanation, co-edited with Katie Robertson. It's out in hardback on 31 Dec, but it's also open access and the PDF is already free to download: global.oup.com/academic/pro...

“a labourer working to put down lasting foundations in the midst of the waves” —Proust on memory of music.

Prediction: the only good consequence of generative AI will be improved public understanding of cryptographic methods to prove authenticity.

Pascal Quignard, The Roving Shadows.

Analia Saban, Perceptron, 2024.

Shanghai at night. Photo taken from the International Space Station, 27 March 2012.

Wonderful article on Zabihollah Mansouri, the prolific Iranian writer who simply made up much of what he “translated“. His Persian rendition of Lolita is twice as long as the original; his The Three Musketeers is ten times as long! See: yalereview.org/article/amir...

We should also arrest everyone else who gave five stars to a Dan Ariely book.

A story about a story to tell, next time you teach Descartes.

Musil To R.Lejeune: "From this awareness that you're looking out for me so much, along with the Wotrubas' warmth flowing into me, so that the art does not go cold...I borrow the recklessness I need to keep building a house of cards, while the earth collapses under it. (November 1939)

I hope these two lonely animals, stranded in a strange landscape far from their natural habitat in Australia, managed to meet and become friends before one of them was tragically killed by a car on the main street in a town called Søllested, whose name translates to 'Miserable Place'

At a party recently people were naming their favourite science fiction films and when I said “Stalker“ everyone said they hadn't seen it except one woman who said “I see, so you're that sort of guy” which is somehow both trivially true and very mean, philosophers of language should look into this.

Continue and persist.

This is incredibly cool work.

God's Eyes Here on Earth is a play designed to be performed in front of the surveillance cameras used to monitor churches. Photo from the Surveillance Camera Players, St. Patrick's Cathedral, Manhattan, 24 September 2000.

There's already a public dataset of 298 million posts from Bluesky, in case you were wondering whether your posts are already being vacuumed into AI.

Another model.

Dust jacket from a Russian edition of Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard, c1933.

I've published three diagrams in @eldiagram.bsky.social and you should (submit to them) too.

I love early accounts of Native Americans who discuss religion with settlers. Here's Adriaen van der Donck (1655) who discusses the problem of evil with Native people. They think that if you believe in an all-good God, then the devil must be in charge to explain evil. Why doesn't God react? Well...

The perfection of sponges.

Due to their rigorous training in epistemology, philosophers are simply immune to this.

Leibniz, optimistically.

The undergraduate students at NYU Shanghai are so good that I have to constantly reevaluate my conception of how good it is even possible for an undergraduate to be

Bandcamp is still the best social media site. Deeply obsessed DJs and record collectors following each other based purely on taste, and you only get to speak if you also buy the record.

Disciplines can be divided into those in which this could happen and those in which it could not.

Very cool paper on historical methodology by @zafulotus.bsky.social —see: doi.org/10.1163/1745...

Surely not in humans, though.

Whiplash between posts on how AI is ruining everything, and posts taking AI sentience seriously. Has anyone defended the view that AI is both sentient and intent on ruining human life?

Prompt: “Generate a picture of four guys who think AI can disrupt books”.

On the Origin of Species was published on Spinoza's birthday.

If aesthetic considerations have non-zero weight in theory choice, everything Spinoza said is true.