Huenemanniac

Getting distracted by ideas

  • 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

  • 3QD: Our very own annus mirabilis

    This isn’t the first time universities have shut down from fear of pestilence. In 1665, “it pleased the Almighty God in his just severity to visit this towne of Cambridge with the plague of pestilence”, and Cambridge University was closed. Students were sent home, and all public gatherings were canceled. Some students arranged to meet… Continue reading

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  • 3QD: Thoughts on Killing a Dog

    Last week we had our dog put down. It was time. She was getting old and facing some serious neurological difficulties. The tipping point was a pair of severe seizures in the middle of the night, spaced about a minute apart. I know that seizures can trigger more seizures, and as I was trying to… Continue reading

  • 3QD: Reflections on It-ing and Thou-ing

    We find ourselves always in the middle of an experience. But it’s what we do next – how we characterize the experience – that lays down a host of important and almost subterranean conditions. Am I sitting in a chair, gazing out the dusty window into a world of sunlight, trees, and snow? Am I… Continue reading

  • 3QD: Conversation with a Genie

    Essay here. Continue reading

  • Back to 3QuarksDaily

    After a bit of a break, I’m going to resume contributing monthly essays at 3QuarksDaily. The first essay is now up, alongside the fascinating essays, poems, and insights from the other contributors. How To Be Kind “There’s only one rule I know of, babies — ‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.’” —Kurt Vonnegut, God… Continue reading

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  • The impact of Boris Hessen

    Reading: Gerardo Ienna and Giulia Rispoli, “Boris Hessen at the Crossroads of Science and Ideology from International Circulation to the Soviet Context”, Society and Politics, 2019, 13:37-63. [These are just some preliminary notes on a very complex story I am only beginning to understand. I was introduced to the topic through discussion of a Facebook… Continue reading

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  • Is there such a thing as the history of philosophy?

    (Reading Christia Mercer. “The Contextualist Revolution in Early Modern Philosophy.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 57, no. 3 (2019): 529-548.) Christia Mercer has revisited the methodological battles that have waged among scholars of the history of philosophy. She uses as her starting point a 2015 exchange between Michael Della Rocca and Dan Garber. Garber… Continue reading

  • Hobbes and coins

    Thomas Hobbes saw humans as purely mechanical devices. External objects press against us in one way or another, setting off a chain reaction of interior pulleys, wheels, and ratchets that engage one another and result in some version of “Cuckoo!” escaping our lips. In some way that he saw no need to explain, the motions… 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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  • Minds as predictive engines

    (Reading Andy Clark, Surfing Uncertainty (Oxford UP 2015)) I’m no longer sure I know what an “ordinary” theory of mind would look like, but I’m guessing that it would resemble an organized camp of explorers. The explorers, or our senses, venture out into the world and report what they see, hear, and encounter. Back at headquarters,… 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

  • On the Other Delphic Maxims

    Now up at Aeon. The conclusion: The fact that the great majority of maxims on the list can still serve us today is itself worth further reflection. There is no denying that our lives have changed a lot in the past 25 centuries. But the need to organise one’s priorities, to cultivate friendships and social… Continue reading

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  • Say, whatever happened to Casearius?

    Readers of Spinoza’s letters will recall the name “Casearius”. Johannes Casearius lived in the same house in Rijnsburg as Spinoza, and Spinoza taught him Cartesian philosophy, an effort which led in part to Spinoza’s book, The Principles of Cartesian Philosophy. Spinoza regarded Casearius as troublesome, and was wary of sharing his own views with him.… Continue reading

  • Gerry’s soldiers

    We have been in the process of sorting through the detritus of my parents-in-law: lots of junk, no longer meaningful to anyone, but occasionally the striking this or that suggestive of a parent’s love, a freakish endeavor, or long afternoons of timeless play. This last mood was suggested by my father-in-law’s tub of tin soldiers.… Continue reading

  • Wisdom from Whitman, Camus, and Mae West

    I am a body. I have been “designed”, through mishap and random success in an ever- changing environment, for millions of years. The result is astonishing: a pumping heart, breathing lungs, and a bewildering array of chemical processes that allow me to maintain a steady temperature, stave off infections, digest food, and repair minor injuries.… 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

  • Chronic dysfunctions of systems

    W. G. Sebald, in Austerlitz: And several times, said Austerlitz, birds which had lost their way in the library forest flew into the mirror images of the trees in the reading room windows, struck the glass with a dull thud, and fell lifeless to the ground. Sitting in my place in the reading room, said… Continue reading

  • A summer education

    Many years ago, I taught a “big ideas” class to a group of summer citizens. These are retired folks who live in Arizona but come up to Logan for the cooler weather in the summer. I taught the course, under one title or another, for a couple of years. Many of the people in my… Continue reading

  • Review of Sloterdijk by Pieter Lemmens

    Thank you to the ever-reading Rick Krause, who forwarded to me this excellent review of Sloterdijk by Pieter Lemmens. An excerpt from his conclusion: …Foams is written in a rich and playful style. His tone is jovial and detached, ironic yet joyful, reminiscent of a certain side of Friedrich Nietzsche. It also owes much to Diogenes.… Continue reading

  • The Challenge of Being Vertical

    Sloterdijk, Peter. You Must Change Your Life, translated by Wieland Hoban (Polity, 2013) We construct for ourselves ideals that taunt us, pull us upwards, and change our lives. This is fixed; but the the nature of those ideals, as well as our natures, the natures that need changing, vary among times and cultures. Sloterdijk’s set… Continue reading

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  • A New Liberal Arts

    The traditional liberal arts (logic, rhetoric, dialectic, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music) arose for two reasons: to preserve knowledge and to render young men fit for positions of influence. Knowledge had pretty much been wiped out in western Europe with the fall of Rome, and winning it back again was hard work. The resulting strategy… Continue reading

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  • “I read as one who abdicates.”

    Fernando Pessoa, writing (or reading) as Bernardo Soares in The Book of Disquiet: I read and am liberated. I acquire objectivity. I cease being myself and so scattered. And what I read, instead of being like a nearly invisible suit that sometimes oppresses me, is the external world’s tremendous and remarkable clarity, the sun that… Continue reading