Hannah Arendt arguing that granting epistemic significance to direct experience requires communal existence. This is three years before Sellars attacked the Myth of the Given in 'Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind'.

What the world would look like if it were literally just Valencia

Since the launch date has been delayed, NASA have no excuse not to get the Artemis 2 crew on Hot Ones. It would save the space program.

Here's a fun documentary David Lodge made of the 'Linguistics of Writing Conference' in 1986 with occasional talking heads from Edward Said, Stuart Hall, Fredric Jameson, Jean-Luc Godard and many more: www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqeS...

The last decade of work on the question-sensitivity of cognitive attitudes (incl. inquisitive semantics, etc.) seems like a good example of philosophers of language, mind and epistemology working together to make meaningful progress and I think that’s cool.

It seems the Telegraph are reporting on my recent move to Spain

Can’t believe I’ve only now learned how people handle gender ambiguity typographically in Spain

Just realised that the cover of Topoi does not, in fact, depict the 12 links of dependent origination as I had always assumed

“Yeah they’ve got Bridgerton in Spain but they call it Los Bridgerton.”

Weird new paper alert! What happens if you apply a consumer-based teleosemantics to the simplest case of neural word embeddings? philpapers.org/rec/MALTFN-2

Sometimes it’s nice to just sit and try to comprehend yourself as a massively complex bundle of chemical processes, to try to grasp the sheer remarkable wonder of your existence.

As someone born and raised on an island, there’s always something magical about coming to the continent. I’m in Spain right now but if I just faced east and started walking, I could reach Vietnam or Malaysia.

A distant star is likely the largest single object you’ll ever see but, because it’s just a speck of light, it’s also one of the smallest.

Someone was posting this old CIA sabotage manual for how to disrupted political organisations and it’s also a pretty good guide to being an analytic philosopher

I wrote this song on Saturday, recorded it yesterday and released it to you today in response to the state terror being visited on the city of Minneapolis. It’s dedicated to the people of Minneapolis, our innocent immigrant neighbors and in memory of Alex Pretti and Renee Good. Stay free

Dagfinn Føllesdal’s sad account of trying to help Quine revise Word and Object just before he died.

People complain about Avatar being the highest grossing film of all time but for the first 50 years of cinema it was just Confederate Lost Cause propaganda.

I love my job and rarely have career envy but this is making me question my life direction.

Lotta people making claims using plural forms without quantifiers (e.g. Americans..., Europeans...) which designate groups but don’t seem to involve predicating things of every member of that group. I sure hope nothing follows from this.

Quine said 'no entity without identity' because you can’t quantify over things you can’t individuate. This was a *really* influential assumption for people like Davidson - can’t individuate conceptual schemes/languages, okay, they aren’t real etc.

A cow's natural lifespan is around 20 years but to ensure a rapid return on investment, they are typically slaughtered at around 18-20 months so I suspect we don't see the complex, social intelligence that would emerge if human's weren't industrially slaughtering them so young

I know it’s silly but this stuff makes me very proud of our weird little monkey species and I think this kind of pride is politically important: www.theguardian.com/science/2026...

The sequoia, General Sherman, is roughly the same age as western philosophy and I think you could spend the whole day just contemplating this fact and it would be a day well spent.

As far as I’m concerned, The Trojan War didn't really end until Heinrich Schliemann finally dynamited the site of Troy to smithereens.

Deeply distressed to hear that Star Trek has been advocating progressive politics in a cringe-inducingly heavy-handed way

Hi Bluesky! What are the best philosophy/machine learning/cognitive science books/papers about representation from the last 20 years?

We must imagine Itsy Bitsy Spider happy

Our @leverhulmecal.bsky.social postdoctoral fellowship posts close for applications on 30 January. A few reflections on the frequently asked questions we have received. So much looking forward to reading your applications and building our team together youtube.com/watch?v=x4AMkxhe4bQ

I love seeing early drafts of poems, especially when the original word choices were terrible.

"Trans members of this profession have been rapidly losing their freedoms and protections.... Scholarship on the philosophy of sex and gender, especially trans philosophy, has come under attack” -- from a recent APA Board open letter to trans philosophers & the philosophy profession...

Confession: I always watch the safety demonstration on an airplane because I know what it’s like giving a talk when no one is paying attention

My new book is available open access from MITPress. It's a pretty new take on syntax, with some cool consequences for long-distance syntactic dependencies, and I think it should also appeal to non-minimalist syntacticians (since there isn't really any movement!) direct.mit.edu/books/oa-mon...

Alternative to eBird that lets you rate the birds, you could call it Roger eBird.

I have too many questions

Can humans & animals really use internal maps to take shortcuts? Tolman famously said yes - based largely on his Sunburst maze. Our new review & meta-analysis suggests evidence is far weaker than you might think. 🧵👇 doi.org/10.1111/ejn.... @uofgpsychneuro.bsky.social @ejneuroscience.bsky.social

New year, new stretch of the Antrim coast

A decision was made to make Hegel wonderfully, unnecessarily blonde and I support it.

Breaking: World is crazier and more of it than we think, Incorrigibly plural.

The combination of Merlin Bird ID and PlantNet is a great way of turning your phone into a tricorder.

Sunrise in Cushendall

We’re now in the last 11 months

Now that ‘I got rhythm’ has entered the public domain, I predict the emergence a whole genre of music in which talented musicians improvise over it (and similar songs perhaps), engaged in complex harmonic investigations, treating it as a ‘standard’ of sorts.

There’s absolutely no guarantee that any of us will be here in 2027. All compounded phenomena are impermanent. Happy New Year!

If you stick on Beethoven’s 5th (Kleiber version) at 23:36:28, the 4th movement will start the new year. Alternatively, if you stick on Thunder Road (Springsteen) at 23:56:10, Clarence Clemons’ solo will start it. Both are good.

Mark Jago's new paper has a rhyming abstract

(Sarcastically) Well, if it isn’t kingdom of daylight’s dauphin.

The Titanic was a perfectly good ship. If you drive any ship into an iceberg it will sink.