why we should

In reshelving books on their shelves recently, with the two bookshelves themselves only returned to their place in the living room after we replaced the flooring, my eye lingered on a book cover. I did not recognise it, but it was familiar in the way one's infancy can return feelings. The book as then both unknown and known at the…

① "not believing in X" is easily confused with ② “not believing” if you have no frame of practice in noticing 'world-building' is what you mean by meaning. We live in an age that follows the rise and fall of many empires. Empires are a collection of kingdoms and cities. Empires are a derivative of the practices of those states.

Reason ① versus Reason ② while currently reading Terry Eagleton's Culture and the Death of God Recently I’ve been circling like a vulture… I am a vulture… I am the… i am vulture thermalling above… — the gap. …looking for the signs of death below on the plains of rationality so I can feed my family in the nest, dear…

This first appeared on substack in June 2023. The etymology of the word thing is more interesting than one might think. Originally this usage meant "assembly", and this itself perhaps arose from a metonymic use when referring to the time appointed… —to decide or assemble. Later this happening then came to mean, again metonymically, a specific issue discussed at such…

D.M. Thomas’ Alexander Solzhenitsyn: A Century in his Life. (1998, New York: St. Martin's Press.) When I was cataloguing this biography I was reminded of the copy of Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago my mother had on the family bookcase at home. I eventually read it and went on to borrow from the state library in Launceston a hardcover of One Day in the Life…

“We are artifacts designed by natural selection,” Daniel Dennett wrote, to which Fodor said no. “Darwin’s idea is much deeper, much more beautiful, and appreciably scarier: We are artifacts designed by selection in exactly the sense in which the Rockies are artifacts designed by erosion; which is to say that we aren’t artifacts and nothing designed us. We are, and…