Reading Log
This is a log of articles and books I’m reading, podcasts I’m listening to, conversations I’m having, and movies I’ve seen in reverse…
Clerestory
A frequent unfiltered stream of thought
Latest posts
What I'm up to
The Podcast I’ve recently posted some podcasts: Husserliana with Noah Martin Eternity and Time with Kit Tempest-Walters Writing and AI with…
What I'm thinking about
This page was automatically generated from my Zettelkasten. It uses git to show which notes have changed recently. I would love to talk to…
Meaningful Life
This page contains a transcript of the current question I’m asking. Listen here. How do you balance the necessities of life with pursuing…
Send Audio to Me
Short instructions: record in the highest quality you can (more info below). Then upload here. This page gives information for uploading…
Dependent Origination without any Pali
This essay contains a practical guide to using the moment-by-moment interpretation of a central Buddhist doctrine to end disturbances in…
Heidegger on Logos
A guest post by Zarina Mazitova and an extension to my article On the Origin of Logic, as well as the video lecture I gave on Strands I…
Introductions to Hegel
Today I asked Twitter to recommend introductions to Hegel written in English. Here were the responses in order of length: Richard Kroner…
I received a microgrant
I’m thrilled to announce that Ben Yeoh has awarded me a ThenDoBetter grant to support the project I’m working on. You can read Ben’s writing…
What I learned this month
On 1 November, I began writing. I intended to post something every day on this blog, even if I didn’t promote it much. It was a meant to be…
Perfection: A real nuisance
Yesterday I got distracted by Schopenhauer’s account of how logic. And we will have to come back to Logos, the etymological root of logic…
Perfection of Logic
This continues directly on from yesterday’s post on Schopenhauer. Today I’ll finish Schopenhauer’s line of reasoning about the perfection of…
On the Origin of Logic
Last week I wrote on Spinoza’s view of perfection. Today I was planning to look at Schopenhauer’s perspective on the origin perfection. I…
The Aphoristic Form
Where does morality come from? Some might resort immediately to human nature, but this, to me, is tantamount to saying that it has no origin…
Indian Philosophy
Part 15 of a series on Whether There Was a West. Yesterday I introduced the philosopher and historian of philosophy Surendranath Dasgupta…
Surendranath Dasgupta
Part 14 of a series on Whether There Was a West. I’ve previously mentioned Bryan W Van Norden’s brilliant piece and provocative piece…
Sinitic Syncretism
Part 13 of a series on Whether There Was a West. Today’s post is about A. C. Graham (1919–1991), a Welsh sinologist who was a professor of…
Breadcrumbs
In my recent writing (e.g. on “the West”) I have promised to return to several points. I’m creating this page to track some of those things…
More Perfection
Continuing the Ethics (1678) where we left off yesterday, Spinoza makes his opposition to teleology even more explicit. For Spinoza, God is…
On Perfection
What does perfection mean to you? Had you asked me this question a few months ago, I might have replied, tongue-in-cheek, that it’s a made…
The Accidental Spinozist
A few years ago I flew from California back to London. Upon landing, whilst still on the plane, I opened my bag to find an unfamiliar book…
How diverse is Greek philosophy?
Part 12 of a series on Whether There Was a West. How different are the Greek schools? As I discussed last week, and continued discussing…
Homogenizing Purges
Part 11 of a series on Whether There Was a West. A few weeks ago, I asked how wide the West was. I then did an experiment where I followed…
The Nature of Light
Part 10 of a series on Whether There Was a West. I wrote a post today about how divergent Greek philosophy really is, but it got too long…
Vision and Abstraction
I’m taking a break today from thinking about homogenisation of history and of science. Today I’m thinking about vision, and how it relates…
The Winners Write the Textbooks
The historian of science Thomas Kuhn (1922–1996), whom I recently introduced, argues that a tell-tale sign of a mature science is the…
Oak and Stone
Part 9 of a series on Whether There Was a West. Hesiod was an ancient Greek poet thought to have been active sometime between 750 and 65…
How the West Was Spun
Part 8 of a series on Whether There Was a West. In this post I begin my response to Myth of the Month 8: “The West” (2019), a special…
The Myth of the West VII
Part 7 of a series on Whether There Was a West. In this post I continue my discussion of Myth of the Month 8: “The West” (2019), a special…
The Myth of the West VI
Part 6 of a series on Whether There Was a West. In this post I continue my discussion of Myth of the Month 8: “The West” (2019), a special…
The Myth of the West V
Part 5 of a series on Whether There Was a West. In this post I continue my discussion of Myth of the Month 8: “The West” (2019), a special…
The Myth of the West IV
Part 4 of a series on Whether There Was a West. In this post I continue my discussion of Myth of the Month 8: “The West” (2019), a special…
The Myth of the West III
Part 3 of a series on Whether There Was a West. In this post I continue my discussion of Myth of the Month 8: “The West” (2019), a special…
The Myth of the West II
Part 2 of a series on Whether There Was a West. In this post I continue my discussion of Myth of the Month 8: “The West” (2019), a special…
The Myth of the West I
Part 1 of a series on Whether There Was a West. About a year ago, I listened to a podcast called Myth of the Month 8: “The West” (2019), a…
On Whether There Was a West
This series will look at the concept of “the West,” and whether it is coherent or useful. The Myth of the West, Part I The Myth of the West…
Thomas Kuhn
Thomas Kuhn (1922–1996) was an American historian and philosopher of science, best known for his 1962 book The Structure of Scientific…
On knowing, of and about
In my recent writing on note-taking, I noted that “to know of something is not to know it.” In writing on following things back to their…
On tracing things back to their sources
Yesterday, in writing about my note-taking system, I mentioned that I’ve become bolder in following references back to their source. That…
Zettelkasten again
Just over two years ago, I wrote about a note-taking system called Zettelkasten. If you’re interested, you can read that post, and a follow…
On the Syntax of Feelings
As a friend of mine is fond of saying, “feeling is first,” after the famous opening of an E. E. Cummings poem from 1926: since feeling is…
An Audio Experiment
I’ve started a podcast, which, like this blog, is called Clerestory. The initial structure is that I speak for 20-30 minutes about topics…
The Muses
In recent weeks it has occurred to me that I know next to nothing about the muses. Their enumeration — nine by most counts (also known as an…
Epicurus and Happiness
Today I’m thinking about Epicurus’ view of happiness. This section comes directly between the two passages on the future (“We must remember…
Epicurus and Death
Epicurus is sometimes seen as anti-Stoic. Certainly Epictetus and other Stoics seem to have reviled him, as I wrote yesterday. Epicurus was…
Epicurus
Epicurus has had a tough time of it since he wrote and taught (~341–270 BCE). It’s a good thing he was level-headed about posterity: We must…
Freedom
A few years ago, at my discussion group, we read Isaiah Berlin’s essay “Two Concepts of Liberty” (1958): PDF of the Essay Two Concepts of…
Heritability of variability
Yesterday I wrote about Darwin’s foreshadowing of r/K selection theory. Today I’ll argue that The Origin of Species also predicts punctuated…
Darwin and r/K selection
Today I’m thinking about Darwin and r/K selection theory. Wikipedia had led me to believe that this was an idea of Robert MacArthur and E. O…
Five-Day Fast
Last week, from Monday 2 November to Friday 6 November 2020, I did a self-run writing retreat at home, during which I also fasted. For those…