Huenemanniac

Getting distracted by ideas

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  • Structure, Energy, and Reality

    This past term I’ve been teaching a capstone class in which students are supposed to write a longer paper on some topic that means a lot to them. It’s meant to be a culminating event for their undergraduate work in philosophy. The class is always a fun exchange of ideas in which I can just… Continue reading

  • What we know when we know particulars

    Some reflections on the early sections of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit: If we try to think about what is most obvious in our experience, and what the most basic elements of knowledge are, we turn to sense perception. For it seems like the more our minds and our concepts are mixed up with what we… Continue reading

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  • Unvatting the Brains: Putnam, Bostrom, and thinking the unthinkable

    The worry is familiar. All of my experience comes to me via my central nervous system, which is a biochemical electrical network. It can be hacked. The data coming from my eyes and ears and so on are converted to electrical signals, and so if those electrical signals were stimulated artificially (i.e., not from eyes… Continue reading

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  • RNZ interview

    The Sunday Show of Radio New Zealand interviewed me about my Delphic maxims piece. It was a delight to speak with Jim Mora, the host. You can listen to the interview here, if you like. We vacationed in New Zealand nearly a decade ago, and had a wonderful time. I regularly think back upon our chance… Continue reading

  • A poisoned peace

    “I realize that if through science I can seize phenomena and enumerate them, I cannot, for all that, apprehend the world. Were I to trace its entire relief with my finger, I should not know any more. And you give me the choice between a description that is sure but that teaches me nothing and… Continue reading

  • Crowd going apeshit

    I’m generally not a fan of pop music, but the recent Beyoncé/Jay-Z video really is masterful:   So many difficult questions are held up for reflection, especially for successful producers and consumers of today’s arts. If you are a successful black or female artist, are you ready to have your work put up next to… Continue reading

  • “Are students snowflakes?” on Access Utah

    Host Tom Williams interviewed my colleagues Erica Holberg and Harrison Kleiner and me about the alleged “snowflake” phenomenon on campuses (students who can’t bear to hear any claims that run counter to their own values). Interview here. Certainly there are episodes which sound plenty snowflakey here or there; one question is whether these episodes are… Continue reading

  • Essay on philosophy and the humanities on Aeon

    By the title, “Why philosophers should hang out at the humanists’ parties” – here. Continue reading

  • The making of the humanities

    I just returned from a multidisciplinary conference on “meta” issues in the humanities: how various humanistic disciplines have shifted over time, various assumptions made or discarded by academic practitioners, and basically any of the stuff you’d come to find if you took humanists and their work as your object of study. The conference featured historians,… Continue reading

  • Truth: an initial stab at the thing

    On campus we are having a series of discussions under the title of “facticity.” No, it’s not a headlong plunge into German idealism and the impossible task of capturing the brute “thatness” of what experience coughs up. Instead, it is about (and ultimately against) a perniciously widespread notion that agents can believe whatever they want,… Continue reading

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  • The Shed

    About five years ago, we hired a great guy named Joe Smart to build a philosopher’s shed for me. (More about that story here.) I’m really glad to have this separate place for reading, thinking, and writing – as nutty as it may seem to anyone else. Anyway, just to celebrate the approach of our… Continue reading

  • My Life as an NPC

    Another Stacks of Books essay to add to the library. This one makes good on a promise I’ve been making for sometime, which was to reflect philosophically on playing Skyrim. (Now those hundreds of hours can count as research!). I’m especially interested in non-playable characters (NPCs), or the fake people one runs into in these… Continue reading

  • The ban on navel contemplation

    I have been busy re-reading Sloterdijk’s Spheres trilogy, working up to a longer reflection on it, but in the meanwhile thought I’d offer up this passages from Bubbles (Spheres I): The navel is located on the human’s front like a monument to the unthinkable; it reminds people of the thing no one remembers. It is… Continue reading

  • Maybe the universe doesn’t exist

    It is not clear to me that the universe exists. I’m not saying, of course, that there aren’t a lot of things in existence – my dog, this laptop, Saturn’s rings, and so on. And with any actual list of existent things, we can talk about the collection of those things, and give that collection… Continue reading

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  • The Problem of Disenchantment

    [Reading Egil Asprem, The Problem of Disenchantment: Scientific Naturalism and Esoteric Discourse, 1900-1939. Brill, 2014.] Egil Asprem’s fascinating and learned work is centered around seeing disenchantment – or the growing propensity to see nature as empty of magical and divine influence – as a persistent problem to which scientists and philosophers responded in various ways… Continue reading

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  • Victorian anthropology

    [Reading George W. Stocking, Victorian Anthropology (Free Press, 1987)] Stocking’s book is most centrally about how 19th-century upper-class British males managed to combine their sense of superiority with an emerging awareness of Darwinian evolution. Many loose threads needed to be woven together: there was the Bible, with its story of Adam and Eve and the Flood;… Continue reading

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  • Nietzsche and Hegel in Salt Lake City

    I had the opportunity yesterday to present a paper to the Nietzsche Society, which was meeting within a larger conference of the Society for Phenomenology and Existentialist Philosophy. The people I met were generous, knowledgeable, and interesting, and my paper seems to have been well received. It was a good time. At bottom, I was trying… Continue reading

  • Stacks of Books

    I’m starting to publish some philosophical / history of ideas essays in a series called “Stacks of Books” (hey, look! A page with that name just under the blog’s banner image!). They’re being published through Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing, which means you need to download the Kindle software (for free) to read them. The essays will… Continue reading

  • Intellectuals

    Most people, for very good reason, place themselves at the center of their universe. I’m not saying they place themselves at the center of the universe, which would be a greedy and ignorant thing to do. They place themselves at the center of their own universe, which means that they place at the center of… Continue reading

  • Reality of ideas, again: the navel-gazing perspective

    What is an idea? On the one hand, it is tempting to say that there can be no explanation without appeal to a special intensional dimension, a protected pocket of our existence that holds meanings. After all, we think ideas; we cannot see them, weigh them, or bat them over the fence. Ideas are intrinsically… Continue reading

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  • Peter Adamson, and the gap problem

    It’s wonderful to have Peter Adamson’s perspective on this perpetual problem in teaching the history of philosophy: whom do I cover, and whom do I leave out? Adamson, of course, is bravely executing “The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps” podcast. He knows it’s impossible, but he’s doing what he can do give some basic… Continue reading

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  • Wonderful photo of Prague

    (Thanks to tumblr) Continue reading

  • Oh, look, there’s my navel

    I spent yesterday and some of today trolling through old Huenemanniac blogposts, sorting them into new categories and wondering whether there may be a way to assemble them into a vanity-bound collection of musings – perhaps “The Huenemanniad.” The most forceful realization I had while strolling down memory lane is that I have indeed had… Continue reading

  • Sabre Dance Boogie

    By Freddy Martin and his orchestra. Continue reading

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  • Aphorism #3

    “One day it will be as if you’ve never been.” Wrap your head around that, Jack, and you’re well along the road to wisdom. Continue reading

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