Blog
Can an identity be true and not true?
On ‘constitutive tension’ in our concepts. Picking apart someone else’s identity? First ask: Why do you want to? What would be gained? And lost? What happens to your own identity in the process?
Gödel is sure Bach, and trans people are sure their gender
Reflections on the Pulitzer-winning ‘Gödel, Escher, Bach’ (1979). Their objection is an infinite regress. They’re laying a trap. If we needed rules about rules about rules, none of us could ever use language at all.
How do we know who we are?
Do we learn it from a crystal ball—or from our guts? How do others state with certainty that they know who they are? Do they have a crystal ball? Of course, we’re jealous. How can we know ourselves, too?
A story worth telling: The world we will build
‘Let This Radicalize You’ asks us to tell stories about how we’ll support each other. Tell a story about how people support each other. People who are listening want to feel they can find a personal role to play. It’s worth doing.
5 ways philosophy fails (sometimes)
Too much time looking down, forgetting to come up for air. I do philosophy. I must accept there’s no one true answer. I must care, help others care, be practical, keep going. I’ll fail often. I hope for small wins.
We wait for the writer to finish the story
Patiently waiting for that person to return. We find ourselves talking too much. Sick of the sound of our own voice. Self-consciousness restricts creativity. Better to write nothing at all?
Can a man take a woman’s gold medal?
After years insisting it’s a cardinal sin, he did it. Transness is real; it just isn’t made of metal. The prize can’t be transferred. If you don’t have transness, that’s fine. You inhabit yourself.
The Heritage Foundation’s new policy paper on one-man, one-woman marriage
They’ve always been sour on gay marriage. Now they’ve written up a plan for a society that doesn’t include us. The Heritage Foundation longs to return to what they remember as a pre-2015 condition when no one had yet written about trans people, sex toys or polyamory.
Fragments of Briceño Guerrero’s surreal philosophy
‘Little architect of the universe’. Anything can shrivel up, disappear, cease to exist. You may be bigger and stronger than everyone else, but the abyss could swallow you tomorrow.