From the archive: "The Agency of Objects", by Ron Richardson #Philosophy #Philsky
08.03.2026 06:56
👍 3
🔁 1
💬 0
📌 0
From the archive: "The Agency of Objects", by Ron Richardson #Philosophy #Philsky
Two flowers, one white, one yellow against a black background. Word FLOWER at top, ribbon below reads JAYAM MATCH WORKS and below SIVAKASI.
Matchbox, 7 March
From the archive: "Kierkegaardian Love and Resignation", by Timofei Gerber #Philosophy #Philsky
Paddington in The Simpsons
I Photoshop Paddington into a movie, TV show, or pop culture until I forget: Day 1815
In 2026, colleges must teach students that this is not the end of the world. We must teach hope. Current undergraduates can barely remember a time before the threats of climate change and authoritarianism loomed to catastrophic scale. Since 2010, the future depicted in TV, books, and games has been dystopian or apocalyptic, so for our current students the end of the world feels more familiar and realistic than a future with hope. Now we are asking them to choose majors and life paths when the desirability, indeed the very existence, of whole sectors of employment are in question, due to the overwhelming promises of LLMs and machine learning. As young people hear daily that vocation after vocation may vanish into automation’s maw, and that democracy, liberty, land, sea, and sky are all in jeopardy, despair is growing. Despair is very emotionally tempting. It means freedom from the responsibility to shape the future. This is a terrifying turning point, but many generations before us have faced such turning points, and met them. We can offer our students perspective. Only a few dozen institutions on Earth are more than 900 years old, and the vast majority are universities. The university system is not a house of straw to buckle in this storm: We are the rocks that have sheltered the knowledge, hope, and truth through tumults which have toppled kingdoms while classrooms endured. We can endure this, and be a guiding light through it, but only by recentering, by teaching citizens, not workers; power, not PowerPoint; aspiration, not apocalypse. Despair is how we lose. The classroom is where we battle it. All other battles flow from here. Ada Palmer is an associate professor of history at the University of Chicago.
This, from Ada Palmer as part of The Chronicle's survey of 11 scholars on the future of higher ed, is what I needed to end the week.
Violence and impotence are beautifully and frustratingly linked. The only time I’ve felt the explosive power of will one assumes will be in a punch is when creating something, but it’s in slow motion. Matter is a beast that only accepts finesse.
One thing I learned from training boxing is you can never punch something hard enough. The punch never gives you what you want. The only way it can is to shatter your own hand punching a wall, but that’s not what you want either. You want to feel a punch explode something, but it never does -
Drawing of a false prophet spouting heresy, from "Commentary on the Apocalypse" by Spanish monk Beatus of Liébana, and illustrated in the 10th/11th centuries AD. (977x976)
From the archive: "Colosseum", by Blake Stone-Banks #Philosophy #Philsky
From the archive: "Deleuze on Ideas, Dialectics, and Multiplicities", by John C. Brady #Philosophy #Philsky
Check out my Kant vid. 3:13 to establish transcendental idealism with nothing but quotes, music, and images. Crushed it.
Question for teaching philosophers: what texts do you teach that get your undergraduate students most excited?
From the archive: "Kant on the Problem of the Organism", by John C. Brady #Philosophy #Philsky
iPhone notification I should turn headphone volume down because I listen too loud too often.
Thanks iPhone, you do keep saying this. But did you consider that maybe I’m built different [partially deaf from listening to loud music on headphones all the time]?
From the archive: "The Motion and Energy of Technology: A Philosophical Investigation", by Taylor J. Green #Philosophy #Philsky
From the archive: "Wilhelm Reich on Class Consciousness and Voluntary Servitude", by Timofei Gerber #Philosophy #Philsky
!["It is so easy to fail to imagine even relatively obvious possibilities that this fact can be easily exploited for humorous effect:"
Screenshot of tweet by MikeBenchCapon on May 8th 2021: "People think that if two people are facing each other then one of them's left is the other one's right, but that's only true if neither or both of them are upside down"
Main text continues: "This works as a joke because (sorry, as philosophers we have to explain this) as you read it the words ‘facing
each other’ prime you to expect that indeed, one person’s left is the other person’s right, and so when the author describes people as “thinking” this, you think ‘of course they think it – it’s true’. And then the humor
comes from obviousness in retrospect that this is not, in fact, generally true, but only true under the ordinary kind of circumstances that we imagine when we imagine two people facing one another.
The same thing, we know, has happened repeatedly in the recent history of metaethics. Before Mackie [1977], it was easy to define moral realism in contrast to noncognitivism..."](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:5bdrmuceq4ypcb2v7jlkxrh5/bafkreidkc5nqnv2j5o5vs3drbtpjbeyxgpb6v3xdktt5b7xrnn3fudl6li)
"It is so easy to fail to imagine even relatively obvious possibilities that this fact can be easily exploited for humorous effect:" Screenshot of tweet by MikeBenchCapon on May 8th 2021: "People think that if two people are facing each other then one of them's left is the other one's right, but that's only true if neither or both of them are upside down" Main text continues: "This works as a joke because (sorry, as philosophers we have to explain this) as you read it the words ‘facing each other’ prime you to expect that indeed, one person’s left is the other person’s right, and so when the author describes people as “thinking” this, you think ‘of course they think it – it’s true’. And then the humor comes from obviousness in retrospect that this is not, in fact, generally true, but only true under the ordinary kind of circumstances that we imagine when we imagine two people facing one another. The same thing, we know, has happened repeatedly in the recent history of metaethics. Before Mackie [1977], it was easy to define moral realism in contrast to noncognitivism..."
People say that posting has no real-world impact but an article in the Oxford Handbook Of Moral Realism carefully explains one of my hilarious jokes, so
Sorry I’m not really sure what you’re talking about. I recommend you go read some philosophy. it’s great. then you can maybe work out “how belief is a part of truth” because I have no idea what you mean. I explained why the article was bad: the writer made up a guy and then got mad at that guy.
MAMMALS/CHIMP7.GIF
Some people are so *tiresome*.
And unfamiliar with the actual ties between physics/astronomy/geography and 16th-17th Century Catholicism. Part of proselytizing (for both Catholics and Protestants) was that they had "better" explanations for the Earth/Heavens than others, for example.
Beep boop beep. Bloop.
Yes, there is no coherent way of understanding a fact as a belief. That’s why no philosopher has ever held that definition.
Yup, for about 400 years. Any proponents of phlogiston and the four humours still kicking in this year of our lord 2026?
But that argument is banal. No one would disagree with it. If I wanna know where my keys are, I need to go look for them. So what? The author pretends that there are these philosopher-goblins who would try to refute that, but these creatures don’t exist. I saw a hobgoblin say “2+2 is banana“ etc.
heres the Borges method for writing great philosophical fiction:
1) there’s a guy in a room
2) he has a book in the room
3) the book is insane
4) the room is also insane (optional)
New issue, number #88, if hot off the digi-press. With writing on mathematics, religion, clarity, and revolution. The whole gamut. Dive in at: epochemagazine.org/issues/88/
#philosophy #Philsky
To drill deeper, it’s inciting incident is an elementary school teacher who presented him with a cute paradox to get him interested in thinking about science. He interprets this experience as “me the small child am so much smarter than teacher, I will pursue science!” The man is a mess.
It pretends to demonstrate some reading of philosophy, but nothing beyond book titles and proper names, but this piss poor understanding (worse than undergrad level) is presented in scholarly tone? Only saving grace is the date of publication, reminds one of a simpler time.