Huenemanniac

Getting distracted by ideas

  • Philosophy: it helps you get reddit points

    The blog Useful Concepts posted a set of interesting observations about why philosophy doesn’t have more of a cultural presence, particularly on the web. The author posted on reddit, and then summed up the more cogent replies. What he came up with is: (1) philosophy isn’t taught in schools; (2) when it is taught, it’s… Continue reading

  • “Perfect Language” essay on Aeon

    Poets, historians, scientists, philosophers – we all seek to capture the world in a net of language. Yet it is the nature of nets to capture some things while letting others slip away. Our words turn experiences into objects, qualities and actions, and we can build these into a kind of structure, a tower reaching… 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 Age of Moonshot Ideals?

    It is hopeless to try to guess at how the future will judge us. We are in the thick of things, and we don’t know what will emerge as important or significant over time. Events that seem to us exciting may well be completely forgotten (except perhaps among specialists), and slow, incremental changes that we… Continue reading

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  • Sloterdijk’s Spheres

    I finished reading volume 3 of Sloterdijk’s Spheres trilogy, and then went back and read the whole series again. It has been a delightful struggle to think through the rich banquet of ideas and images he offers. I have written up my overall account of the work in a new “Stacks of Books” essay (available on… Continue reading

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  • Dansplaining

    (Some reflections on Dennett’s From Bacteria to Bach and Back.) Daniel Dennett loves to explain. In route to explain one thing, he’ll explain three intermediate things, taking time out to explore four or five tangential things. We might call this mania “dansplaining.” Indeed, this is his vision of what philosophy can and should do: utilize… Continue reading

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  • 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

  • Robots and responsibility

    [Another excerpt from Reality (a primer)] What worries many people about being told that the mind isn’t distinct from the body is what that might mean for human freedom and responsibility. If I create a robot that comes over and stomps through your garden, no one holds the robot responsible. It is just doing what… Continue reading

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  • Knowledge, that human practice

    Ordinarily, we think knowledge is having in one’s head some kind of story or an explanation that matches how Things Really Are. This ordinary conception has at least two problems. First, it assumes that there is a way Things Really Are – that some particular story or explanation is successful at capturing that way, and… Continue reading

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  • On teaching mediocre books

    It’s been a few years now since I realized an obvious truth. The great majority of my students, and even the majority of the philosophy majors I teach, are not going to graduate school in philosophy. This is as it should be. There are already far too many PhDs than there are teaching jobs, and… Continue reading

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  • Demons and Descartes

    (Reading The Possession at Loudun, by Michel de Certeau, translated by Michael B. Smith) Over the years 1632-38, in the French town of Loudun, 17 nuns and 10 secular women were examined and treated for being under the sway of demons in one way or another. Some were possessed, meaning that one or more demons… Continue reading

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  • Meet the idealists

    [excerpt from World as Idea] We have already met one idealist – Kant, who claimed that by the point at which we are conscious of experience, it has been shaped into a certain order in just the way a lecturer prepares his notes. Indeed, Kant believed that the human mind is very ambitious in its… Continue reading

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  • 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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  • Robots, faux urbanity, and public spaces

    My son had a robotics competition in Layton, which is a sprawling mass of houses and big box stores perched at the south end of Hill Air Force base. Nearby is a new shopping and living community which I’d always wanted to check out, so I took some time to do it. “Station Park” –… Continue reading

  • Living in the light of necessity

    [excerpt from To View from Eternity] The neoplatonists urge us to see our troubled lives from the view of eternity. The world issues from the metaphysical character of the One, which means that the order of the planets and the balance of our seasons all result from an inviolable order, just as geometrical propositions are consequences… Continue reading

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  • Needed: a handbook for e-life

    There probably is room in today’s ideosphere for a handbook for living a balanced life in our ephemeral e-world. If course, for a great many humans (the majority? I think so, but I’m not sure) there really is no e-world, or it is a minor distraction from the non-e-world, or just “the real world,” as… Continue reading

  • The flux of it all

    [An excerpt from Reality: a primer] Heraclitus was one of the earliest known philosophers. He lived in what we now recognize as western Turkey, in the late 6th century BCE. We know hardly anything about him, and his philosophy is conveyed to us in fragments quoted by other people. The single most famous indirect quote… Continue reading

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  • Getting the facts straight

    [Reading Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity, Zone Books, 2007.] We might think that knowers have striven always for objectivity, for a vision of the world unblemished by the viewer’s own biases and prejudices. But Daston and Galison argue that it is a concept that was constructed in the recent past – mainly in the… Continue reading

  • 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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  • Living cynically

    (an excerpt from Doubts) The contemporary German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk defines “cynicism” as enlightened false consciousness. It is what results when we know all too well our own weaknesses and limitations, and our own involvement in dastardly practices, but then find ourselves having to go on with the business of life nonetheless. We know better… 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

  • Voting for artichokes

    For some reason there’s been a lot of talk about voting. My understanding of voting is (predictably) rather instrumentalist and flat-footed: since there is no more rational way of deciding things, we make our preferences known (show of hands, cast ballots, computer clicks, etc), and let the question be decided by whatever side gets more… Continue reading

  • Best argument for dualism?

    The best argument for dualism I know is the argument from subjectivity. The first premise is that experience requires a subject – an entity who is having the experience. Now it may be that this entity isn’t what it thinks it is; it may be a bundle of impressions, or a conscious field that exists… Continue reading