Memory is freedom of the past. But what has no present will not accept the present of a memory either. - Maurice Blanchot, "The Essential Solitude"

Reading this & thinking of one of my advisors, a brilliant Derrida scholar who met me at a café in Chicago while visiting from France. We were apparently talking so loudly about death over coffee that the couple a few tables over picked up their omelettes and moved inside

The real analytic-continental divide is in email word counts

There is something profoundly lost in analytic philosophy’s insistence on writing in such exclusively mechanical tone. Knowledge takes on a different shape when guided by feeling… I don’t understand why or when we decided that’s a bad thing.

In the first 25yrs of the Internet we never thought of ourselves as creating a unique, priceless resource for future generations - an archive of pure, uncontaminated, human-generated training data - yet such a thing will never be achieved again.

I am right now writing a paper on functionalism & LLMs that I was excited to ask Dennett to coauthor with me. He inducted me into philosophy, as generous & patient & incisive a mentor as one could hope for. All my philosophical work I have done for him. Uncertain how to reorient.

Finishing last revisions on my dissertation with an epigraph from The Crossing, sharing it because I love it

if god is allowed to work in mysterious ways then so am i

"Because we are in the world, we are condemned to meaning" is perhaps the most metal line in the entire history of philosophy (merleau-ponty, phenom of perception xxii)

without the internet archive the vast majority of the internet as we once knew it will be lost forever.

i hope my book is in libraries everywhere so that people who can't buy it can read it, and yes, that includes the internet archive

also i can't even write my book without the endless architectural history resources and trade catalogs assembled in the internet archive. it's not possible. those resources dwarf even academic repositories of such information.

What detractors of free online archives like the Internet Archive don't get is that it's not about getting things for free instead of having to pay for them, it's about the kinds of things that only exist if they are free.

my john gatto reading, unschool-dabbling teenage self would have gone all in on hegel