Latest Posts

  • asking pardon of the spirit of the tree

    Originally posted on coromandal: Imagine asking pardon of the spirit of the tree before cutting a branch, of the mountain before extracting stone for aggregate, of the lake before fishing, the stream before removing water, the sky taking a bird, the earth… Continue reading

  • Recognizing Human Dignity

    It is risky to predict the outcome of Supreme Court cases based on what the justices say at the oral argument. But Kennedy’s commitment to the principle of human dignity and his understanding of its role in protecting intimate relationships… Continue reading

  • Decision

    If I am no longer the man I was, it is because I decide to become the man I will be. Continue reading

  • Karl Jaspers as Interdisciplinarian

    A very solid piece on the interdisciplinary nature of Jaspers’ psychopathology as well as the connection of his first great work on the embodied mind to his later existential and historical works. As the managing editor of the Oxford Handbook… Continue reading

    Karl Jaspers as Interdisciplinarian

  • Occupying Space

    A man should be so poor that he is not and has not a place for God to act in. To reserve a place would be to maintain distinctions. Meister Eckhart quoted in Merton, Thomas. Zen and the Birds of… Continue reading

    Occupying Space

  • Fate and the Wire

    Tautological understanding is very much a part of The Wire‘s metaphysics. David Simon directs/authors the series structurally along the lines of Greek Tragedy rather than the Shakesperean variety. Essential paths–following the strict law of identity–play a huge role in instantiating a… Continue reading

    Fate and the Wire

  • Bibliometrics: The Leiden Manifesto

    Data are increasingly used to govern science. Research evaluations that were once bespoke and performed by peers are now routine and reliant on metrics1. The problem is that evaluation is now led by the data rather than by judgement. Metrics… Continue reading

  • How Legalizing Psychedelics Creates a Healthy Competition with Organized Religion

    Organized religion is almost always a monopoly. Legalization of mind opening substances would lead to a free market of ideas that dogmatic superstructures cannot survive. In a culture that prides itself on a bizarro academic sense of rationality, there is… Continue reading

    How Legalizing Psychedelics Creates a Healthy Competition with Organized Religion

  • Charting more diffuse influences across time

    My colleagues Adam Briggle, Robert Frodeman and Britt Holbrook continue their work on the philosophy of impact and the impact of philosophy… Today even the humanities are expected to have an impact. In the 2014 REF, for instance, philosophy formed… Continue reading

  • NYU as a Model for Predatory Higher Education

    The Art of the Gouge… describes how NYU engages in a mind-numbing range of tricks and traps to extract as much in fees as possible from students, while at the same time failing to invest in and often degrading the… Continue reading