- 1000-Word Philosophy: An Introductory Anthology

A Philosopher’s One-Word Theory to Explain Why the World Feels So Weird

Once you learn what the "uni-context" is, you won't stop seeing it everywhere

Five Manifestos for the Beautiful World: The Alchemy Lecture 2023

The Alchemy Lecture 2023

An untitled post from Mar 2011

Posted on Thursday 17 Mar 2011. 1,130 words, 10 links. By Matt Webb.

Reading philosophy for the examples

Philosophy books often have really good examples. Here are a few of my favourites.

Road to a book lexicon (Part 2) - Nick The Sick

The one where I actually define a lexicon

lexicon

Word clouds and lexicon-tagged views of someone's prose.

Meditations on Machinic Desire

The philosopher and accelerationist Nick Land writes, in his 1993 essay Machinic Desire, three of the most insight-dense paragraphs I’ve ever encountered:

Why Context Matters: Or, Where Did Anglo-American Philosophy Go Wrong? - Imprint Academic

Why were so many luminaries of European philosophy — such as Bergson, Heidegger, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and Sartre, even Marx and Freud — kept out of the philosophy curriculum of Anglo-American universities for most of the 20th century? Why were the schools of philosophy they founded derided as continental philosophy and deemed more suitable for the departments of literature and psychology than philosophy? This book argues that the institutionally sanctioned contrast between allegedly legitimate philosophy and its spurious continental counterpart became entrenched thanks to two intertwined metaphysical presuppositions at the heart of positivism. The first is the principle that higher-level complex systems are epiphenomenal. The second is that all causes are mechanical. In contrast to their continental European counterparts, Anglo-American metaphysicians and philosophers of science repeatedly resisted the idea that higher level phenomena might be, ontologically-speaking, relational. This book proposes that, had the alternative path that emphasizes context-dependence been selected, a scientifically respectable relational ontology might have come to inform Anglo-American metaphysics and epistemology as well as the actual practice of science — without falling prey to non-natural deus ex machina proposals. Four female British philosophers at Oxford during WWII attempted to do exactly that. Anscombe, Foot, Midgley, and Murdoch raised serious objections to Oxbridge’s Newton-inspired Positivism as early as the 1940s. The four good friends advocated for a context-dependent worldview. This book situates the four women philosophers’ valiant challenge to the entrenched paradigm as a case study of exactly why and how context matters. Paperback 165 pp. £14.95

The Hero with a thousand faces

The first popular work to combine the spiritual and psy…

Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags - Clay Shirky

Based on two talks I gave in the spring of 2005—one entitled "Ontology Is Overrated", and one entitled "Folksonomies & Tags: The rise of user-developed classification."

Philosophy Experiments — Interactive Thought Experiments

Explore 27 interactive philosophy experiments that challenge your moral intuitions, test your logical reasoning, and probe the boundaries of belief.

Manifesto Quest ⚔️

the universe is made of stories, not atoms

Idle Words - Maciej Ceglowski

This site is a collection of blog posts and short essays I've been writing since 2002. These are mainly about travel and food. You can find links to articles by category and a list of the all-time most popular articles on the front page.

A Thousand Plateaus

A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia is a 1980 book by the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the French psychoanalyst Félix Guattari. It is the second and final volume of their collaborative work Capitalism and Schizophrenia. While the first volume, Anti-Oedipus (1972), was a critique of contemporary uses of psychoanalysis and Marxism, A Thousand Plateaus was developed as an experimental work of philosophy covering a far wider range of topics, serving as a "positive exercise" in what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as rhizomatic thought.

Mapping the Mind of a Large Language Model

We have identified how millions of concepts are represented inside Claude Sonnet, one of our deployed large language models. This is the first ever detailed look inside a modern, production-grade large language model.