How his thinking about mass production might have implications everywhere. Chetan is right: the thought of Walter Benjamin is a wellspring of brilliance, and Benjamin deserves a wider and deeper reading. The Arcades Project amazed me a decade ago, and I find it hard not to reference “The Work of…

On Why Freedom Is Improbable Worry creates its own evidence, against which freedom struggles to rationally compete. By virtue of how worry pulls phenomena “toward” itself as evidence for its justification, freedom likely cannot survive safety concerns. If you and I are sitting in a kitchen and there is a…

How the world might be profoundly changed if we can enjoy our living room. Imagine you can sit in a room and feel perfectly happy. Not expensive, right? Now imagine you can be perfectly happy playing tennis. Not expensive either, is it? True, but unless you own your own court…

The other side of the coin People generally sense how money can conceal from them their inability to hunt for food, build their own house, and the like. We know that if we were dropped on a desert island, we would probably be in trouble, but because of money I…

Is the answer somehow yes and no? In my work, I often claim that “the true isn’t the rational,” which is to say that they are distinct categories, and the main point is that rationality is always relative to what we believe is true, which begs the question of how…

A Hermeneutics of Martin Buber and “True Infinity” Walker Kaufmann tells us in his Prologue to I and Thou by Martin Buber that Buber taught Kaufmann ‘how to read.’¹ This is because Buber taught Kaufmann to treat writers like a You and not an It, which is to make space…

On a question of observation that doesn’t replace metaphysics with empiricism but still tests it. By what metric can we judge if a metaphysics or worldview is better than another? As noted by Dimitri in “The Net (24),” the moment we use the word “better,” we must be assuming a…

Considering The Science of Logic and Modern Counter-Enlightenment alongside Alex Ebert and Layman Pascal In my conversation on “Absolute Knowledge” with Cadell Last, I channeled Wittgenstein to claim that “The Truth” was “everything that was the case,” while “The Absolute” was “everything that was the case, plus us.” This paper…

How what’s “technically true” might not be realer than what is “practically the case.” What is “technically true” is what we have been trained to believe is “most true,” while what is “practically true” is what we are trained to believe is “less true.” This, I believe, is partially a…