A space for thoughts in silence. Here I gather poems, personal philosophical essays, and other reflections on life. Poetry {{ posts|tag:poetry|limit:5 }}...
for Carl Item 1. A motorcycle. Not transportation. A language. Chrome could be trusted. Bolts tightened when tightened. Engines answered honestly. Girls were more difficult. ⸻ Item 2. One girl said she loved you at sixty miles an hour. You told her you preferred motorcycles. She shook you hard enough to move both of you out of the road. Three months in the hospital is a long time to learn that…
Plot Summary (Spoilers Ahead) Thirteen years after Aang and his friends defeated Fire Lord Ozai, Republic City stands, peace holds, and Team Avatar are adults. The new Last Airbender film begins as a mystery about a forgotten Avatar and becomes a sustained inquiry into what would remain of the Air Nomads if restoring them required conquest and the abandonment of their own values. After being…
Hans Jonas and Responsibility without a Cosmic Signature Governing Claim Hans Jonas published Das Prinzip Verantwortung in German in 1979; the English translation, The Imperative of Responsibility , appeared five years later. He was then in his mid-seventies, and the book rests on a philosophical biology he had been developing since the 1950s. Born in Germany in 1903, he had studied with Heidegger…
⸻ I. Butler’s Underlying Logic: From Levinas to Political Ontology The underlying logic of Precarious Life involves a double movement. Butler relocates Levinas’s “ethics of the face” from the terrain of metaphysics into that of political ontology. Levinas argues that the face addresses us with the injunction not to kill. Butler asks a prior question: whose face is permitted to appear as a face?…
I. Not Causation, but Lowered Protection Suicide prevention has a language for contagion . It does not yet have an adequate language for what makes suicide imaginable before any specific crisis arrives. We know how to speak about exposure: the death of a peer, the public narration of a celebrity suicide, the danger of method, glamour, imitation, and clustering. We are less able to name the quieter…
Abstract This essay addresses three connected questions. First, can genius be separated from moral character? Second, does Martin Heidegger's moral failure stand outside his philosophy, or reveal something about its structure? Third, does Emmanuel Levinas offer a genuine ethical alternative, and what becomes of that alternative under technological conditions increasingly shaped by artificial…
AI, Mental Health, and the Political Morality of Outsourced Care The deepest danger of AI in mental health lies in a form of success: systems that work just well enough to become acceptable substitutes for the human and institutional obligations owed to vulnerable persons. They stabilize distress while weakening the conditions under which thicker forms of care, recognition, and collective demand…
Ducks were never floating on the surface — those selfie-stick telescoping legs of theirs are braced hard against the riverbed, practising a posture known as dignity. Chickens, meanwhile, have already seen through the whole business of going into water: nothing but surrendering the patent, giving up that last telescoping to a bowl of vermicelli soup. A mature thought knows to spin whole, like a…
他们说 你是天上的星星 掉在玻璃瓶里 你安静的视线 凝向远方 手里拨动的 小珠子 滚呀滚 就像每周载你，开往 干预课的车轮 多年后 我想起那个放学的下午 你挥动手臂，告别师友 细细调好书包的肩带 别担心，你空旷地微笑 ——我只是未来的人类 早生于这个世间 Written on Autism Awareness Day
I write spring — not the sweet rain that nourishes all things. I write the seed-buying list, the football oval filling up, your drowsy eyes on the morning daylight saving ends — sports day circled in red, a reminder: don’t dawdle, catch up with time. I write summer — not lush woods and lotus ponds. I write scorched brown hills, roads shimmering with mirage, small hands clutching the popsicle,…