Ancient being of unclear age ✅ Big hat ✅ Brings gift ✅ Appears at Christmas ✅

Correlation isn’t causation, but it’s correlated with causation, and this meta-level correlation presumably corresponds to a causal relation… and apparently I’m ‘ruining Christmas’ because I won’t stop with the philosophy stuff

It’s been many years but I still find it funny that incompatibility semantics was introduced in Polish notation.

Dublin Seagulls

Hanging out with a friend’s baby and violating every island constraint possible in front of them. You don’t want things to be too easy.

Instead of doing a full albums of the year list, here’s my ranking of the 8 studio albums Bruce Springsteen released in 2025.

It seems the bridges of Königsberg problem was eventually solved by the Soviet Air Force.

Shucks, another year without time person of the year going to the global proletariat (2006 doesn't count)

This is from a satirical magazine written by Anthony Kenny and Julius Kovesi in Oxford, 1958-59. I have reviewed so many papers in the last 5 years that are basically just this.

I wonder who invented intellectual humility. I bet they didn’t even take credit for it. What a hero.

While this paper shows the viability of the Torment Nexus as a tool, one challenge we have not addressed is whether the construction of the such a device would be desirable. We invite further exploration into the ethical, practical, and strategic considerations inherent in leveraging such technology

Not gonna lie, trying to model intuitionistic logic will leave you Heyting algebra.

Wait, what? My son’s friend, traveling in China, is staying at a hotel chain called ‘James Joyce Coffetel’, and instead of a Gideon Bible, they leave a copy of Ulysses by the bedside.

There’s no Wykeham Professor of Logic, people can just say anything.

This is amazing

This really devalues the FIFA Peace Prize and i have half a mind to return my one

It’s worth knowing that the health minister of Ireland’s centre-right government is concerned about contagion from ‘the English disease’ (transphobia)

It was the best of all possible worlds, it was the worst of all possible worlds

Excited to announce @leverhulmecal.bsky.social posts - we are looking for 7 interdisciplinary fellows to join our Leverhulme Centre for Algorithmic Life, closing date 30 January 2026 (1/3) durham.taleo.net/careersectio...

Giving a lecture on the Prajñāpāramitā this afternoon. I'll report in if anyone achieves spontaneous awakening.

Okay McEwan, you don’t see epistemologists out there writing On Chesil Beach, let’s stick to what we’re good at.

I love the idea of someone who believed their language carved nature at its joints but then gave it up because of the Löwenheim-Skolem theorem.

At the very least, an adequate theory should do these three things I just came up with which I'm kind of sure my paper talks about.

A student informed me today that ISO is not an acronym since the organisation is called the International Organization for Standardization (IOS). They just needed an international standard that wouldn’t privilege any language and I think that’s beautiful.

Coming up on my favourite international event of the year

Real bear in a honeypot feelings when you discover someone’s teaching materials for a technical course from 2005 by adding and removing bits from a url

After four weeks of using Zorro in all of my examples and many of my slides, my students have informed me that not a single one of them knows who Zorro is.

CONTINGENT PHILOSOPHERS! (Contractually, not metaphysically). I’ve been a big fan of @contingent-mag.bsky.social for a while. This year they’re letting philosophy piggyback one of their institutions: the year-end list of books and articles written by non tenured/permanent academics in that year.

I feel like this is a euphemism I’m going to start using. Did you hear yer man exited the market? Sure, that’ll be a well-attended funeral.

This Millikan line goes (as they say) hard.

Don’t think you need to know Irish to see the issue with this philosophical dictionary entry

I’ve moved onto pavement weeds and can now identify: groundsel, common bittercress, maidenhair spleenwort, common tansy, spiny sowthistle, smooth cat’s ear, pennyroyal, tufted/bramble vetch, catchfly, mugwort, wood sage, weld and garlic mustard. Every walk is a nature walk.

It’s all fine until they show the chimps people criticising them online for being wrong in the first place. Then they double down. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

I have a friend who keeps using mereology as an example of a weird thing analytic philosophers care about that has absolutely no value outside their weird little analytic philosophy debates. Looking forward to sending him this.

Shamelessly nicked from Kris McDaniel over on Facebook: the book review that will make your weekend.

Struggling to sleep? Have you considered a rambling machine-generated podcast tangentially connected to the work of famous philosophers making use of any information in the public domain?

It’s unfortunate to watch neuroscientists debating about whether spike rates or oscillatory dynamics are more important for cognition when Kant already showed that it’s done by the transcendental ego and so won’t appear in any time-series data.

I can’t believe a student used ChatGPT to write their obligatory statement declaring God is Dead that I, a philosophy lecturer, have my students complete every year. What is the world coming to?

I feel like we get fewer of these "I’m going to compare the views of some people I know" papers these days. It’s a genre I really like. Here's a great one by Millikan.

Happy World Philosophy Day!

As a reminder, the traditional gift to the philosopher in your life on World Philosophy Day is cash

Discourse surrounding “AI” these days often feels like a guy showing you his shovel and you say, “that’s a nice shovel” and he says “I am going to perform surgery on my mother with this shovel” and you say “Oh God please don’t that is not what a shovel is for.”

Happy International Men's Day! Don't forget, there's nothing more 'men' than Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band.

It’s so weird when students come to your office to talk about your friend’s work. It’s weirder when they’ve been really thinking about it and they understand your friend’s ideas better than you do. Pretty neat though!

I don't mean to boast, but my grasp of the English language is far too good for me to mistake fools gold for gold, let alone water for twin-earth water.

A student left the first lecture with head in hands saying "It's all entangled, all the ideas are connected". I'm taking this as a good sign.

Inferentialists! Now is your time to act!!! The era of Verstand must be ended. We shall now proceed to construct the order of Vernunft!

It’s still wild to me that there was only 66 years between the Wright Flyer and people actually walking on the moon. The twentieth century started with no flight and ended with the International Space Station.

Since clarification is still clearly needed, continental philosophy (i.e. data-free sociology) is influenced by early Marx, particular the work on alienation. Analytic philosophy (i.e. also data-free sociology) is influenced by later Marx, particularly the reproduction schemas in Capital vol 2.

Big day for semantic externalists, eBird have dropped their new taxonomy! That feeling in the back of your throat was the bird words you knew receiving new referents: ebird.org/news/2025-ta...