HOW TO PHILOSOPHIZE ON THE INTERNET

Keynote weeper. Author Dictionary of Fine Distinctions and Phrased & Confused (coming soon). Words in The New Yorker and McSweeney's.

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In painting, non-representational artists are called decorative or abstract. In writing, non-representational artists are called philosophers.

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“If by eternity is understood not endless temporal duration but timelessness, then he lives eternally who lives in the present.”

—Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 6.411

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“There’s no disputing taste.” Yes, but there is cultivating it.

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"Authoritarian governments don't like dictionaries. They live by lies and bamboozling abstractions and can't afford to have words accurately defined."

—Kenneth Clark, Civilization Episode 10: "The Smile of Reason"

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BUILDING BLOCKS

Funny that we should envision particles as solid when the very idea of solidity depends on the arrangement of those particles and not the other way around. A particle cannot be a solid. Can we even call it a thing?

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THE LADY DOTH PROTEST TOO MUCH, METHINKS

Arguments for something always begin at a disadvantage — namely, that what they are arguing for needs defending in the first place.

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Phrased & Confused

Excited to share the cover for my second book, Phrased & Confused, illustrated by Liana Finck

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"The principal purpose of what has passed for humanities education has been to convince students that the humanistic tradition is not what they think it is. This is a peculiar pedagogical goal, to say the least, since typically at the outset students do not have any idea what the humanistic tradition is, or even that it exists at all. They are being rushed straight from ignorance to contempt, without any serious effort to familiarize them with their contempt’s object."

—From A Third Way for the Humanities

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How strange that the most effective way to change who you are is to accept who you are.

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People oppose reason to emotion. Are the flowers opposed to the roots?

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"It has become a mark of sophistication to equate the work with 'the text,' but translators who do so make a fundamental error. The text is no more the work than a score is music. The work is the experience the text is designed to produce."

—Gary Saul Morson, "A Question of Purpose: On Translating Russian Literature," Hedgehog Review

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Idleness is like swimming out to sea: waves of anxiety crash down on you at first, but eventually you come out to the smoother waters of thought.

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Two answers is a question.

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TWO TYPES OF TYPOS

There is writer's brain and editor's brain. There are flow states and states of self-consciousness. There's writing from the heart and writing, or overwriting, from the head. If there are typos in your final drafts, it's possible you haven't edited it enough — but much more importantly, if there aren't typos in your early drafts, you're probably in the wrong gear.

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TIME STOCKS

We say we "spend" time on things, but it's more accurate to say that we "invest" time in things. The more we are with something, the deeper we get to know it, the larger the fund of memories we have of it, the more confident we grow in it.

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PENNIES GROSS AND NET

A penny saved isn't just a penny earned—it's better. The latter is taxed.

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THE ART OF THINKING

Philosophy: the attempt to think beautifully