Joel Gn: The End of Transmission

Pandemics in the age of communication technologies are stranger beasts than the parasitical agents that gave birth to them.
Read MoreDancing Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche’s body of work is notoriously difficult to navigate. He wrote in multiple styles, including essays, aphorisms, poems, and fiction.
Read MoreTurning to f116v

I think I'm finally ready to come out as a Voynich scholar. I've been studying hi-res scans of the manuscript off and on for four years or so...
Read MoreSuffering and Soul

I’m a Christian and may be a Nietzschean. Not the whole overwrought overman stuff, and not the conflation of pity and weakness.
Read MoreEd Simon: Another Man’s System

Excavated from the Iraqi desert at Tel Asmar in 1933 by a group of archeologists from the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute were a dozen votive figurines
Read MoreAdversarial culture rests on dubious ideas…

Philosophical discussions, whether in a professional setting or at the bar, frequently consist of calling out mistakes in whatever has been proposed: ‘This is all very well, but …’
Read MoreAn Organic Marx?

The effort to revive and recover critical theory and its intellectual precedents has become more difficult at a time in which ‘critique’ is regularly denounced as negative, skeptical and anthropocentric
Read MoreDo Trees Exist?

There are two very different essays I’ve been meaning to write, both of which equally merit the title of the present one. The one would address the special meaning of ‘existence’ as distinct from ‘being’...
Read More‘What endures of Russell’s logic is of interest only in logic’

In philosophical circles, there are two Bertrand Russells, only one of whom died 50 years ago.
Read MoreJustin E. H. Smith: Ecstatic Rationalism

I have recently been informed that I am “outside of the sociology” of academic philosophy. The person who said this of me is someone I like and admire...
Read MoreEd Simon: Jesus Shat

As an Advent rumination, I’d like to consider El Caganer. In the accumulated cultural esoterica of the Christmas season, from the horned and fearsome demon...
Read MoreMuscovian? Rather: Musky

The so-called Muscovy duck is so called not in view of its homeland in the vicinity of Moscow --for in fact it is native to Central and South America-- but rather in mistranslation of its Latin designation...
Read MoreEd Simon: A Struggle in Edom

About a hundred years after that fateful day when the Augustinian monk Martin Luther apocryphally affixed his remonstrance to the door of Wittenberg Cathedral, and thus supposedly initiated the Reformation...
Read MoreOn the Perpetual Virginity of the Blessed Virgin Mary

In January the Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio, suffered a minor scandal concerning the virtue of the Mother of God.
Read MoreM. Munro: Ethics and Andrea Long Chu

Andrea Long Chu’s Females is—already—many things to many people, including, as Bryony White notes, “an exercise in logic, not what they were expecting.”..
Read MoreGriselda, Top Girls and Rethinking Feminist Subjectivity

Throughout much of my academic life as a feminist medievalist, I regarded Chaucer's Griselda as “patriarchal history’s doormat.”
Read MoreAnsgar Allen: Extinction Rebellion and European Nihilism

There is an uncanny resemblance between Extinction Rebellion and what Friedrich Nietzsche once called “European nihilism”.
Read MoreWho’s a feminist?

It is the best of times and it is the worst of times to declare oneself a feminist today. Presentations of that creature have been shape shifting for decades, though right now she suddenly seems more popular than ever...
Read MoreEd Simon: Still Nervous about Harold Bloom

We come to bury Harold Bloom, not to praise him. The misinterpretations, reactionary poses, and grandiose sentiments too often live after our seemingly once-omnipotent critics pass...
Read MoreM. Munro: Making It Explicit

One of Kafka’s posthumously published fragments concerns a philosopher whose sole activity, as a philosopher, consists in giving chase to a child’s toy.
Read MoreThe tea should be strong. For a pot holding a quart, if you are going to fill it nearly to the brim, six heaped teaspoons would be about right...
Read MoreThe thing about new blooms is that they tend to bleed— / Those petals birthed / hugging close / that come warmer weather are tricked into jumping away...
Read MoreI spent a good part of my childhood at home staring outside my bedroom window, following the trail of planes approaching the nearby Paris airport in the sky from my banlieue. I envied the passengers...
Read MoreThe tea should be strong. For a pot holding a quart, if you are going to fill it nearly to the brim, six heaped teaspoons would be about right...
Read MoreThe thing about new blooms is that they tend to bleed— / Those petals birthed / hugging close / that come warmer weather are tricked into jumping away...
Read MoreI spent a good part of my childhood at home staring outside my bedroom window, following the trail of planes approaching the nearby Paris airport in the sky from my banlieue. I envied the passengers...
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