The original article is © the author, 2026, published open access by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Canadian Philosophical Association under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence. Delon, N. (2026). La banalité du pire des maux. Dialogue, 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0012217326101048.

Why do we eat bacon but treat our pets like children? Why do we subject millions of rats to harmful experiments every year for biomedical and scientific research of dubious value? We are speciesists, the standard story goes. I’ve worked in animal ethics for nearly seventeen years. I’ve never really been convinced that speciesism did any profound explanatory work. The word is hard to say and spell; so-called “arguments from marginal cases” and analogies to sexism and racism offend a lot of people. But I’m not here to spill the beans on my dissatisfaction with the undue attention the concept has received. François Jaquet wrote a neat little (but no less important) book that is a model of analytic philosophy. Clear and analysis, rigorous argumentation, written in an accessible and witty style. I don’t share François’s sense of the importance of speciesism, but I really enjoyed the book.

Jaquet argues that speciesism is real, pervasive, and unjust. Worse: it’s the worst thing we do. The book is one of the most rigorous defenses of antispeciesism in any language. One of its main virtues is to regiment our understanding of the very concept of speciesism — Jaquet reviews a dozen slightly inconsistent definitions offered over the fifty-odd years since Peter Singer’s landmark Animal Liberation, and before that, Richard Ryder’s coinage of the term. To put it kindly, it’s a bit of a mess, and Jaquet restores some welcome order. Speciesism, for Jaquet, is not an ideology, a system, a preference, a bias, or a prejudice but first and foremost a discriminatory behavior. Simply put, it is unequal treatment based on species membership. You don’t need to hate animals or believe anything in particular about them to be a speciesist. You just need to treat them worse than humans because of their species — even though, as Jaquet amply demonstrates in later chapters, speciesism has essential psychological dimensions.

Here, I bracket some parts of my article to interrogate our persistent focus on speciesism as an evil. I didn’t write this to defend speciesism — I think there are some pretty good defenses, but I’m mostly convinced by the basic case against. No, I don’t think you should treat animals poorly just because they’re animals. But my point in the article is different: We may never have been speciesists, or only very recently. Our treatment of animals, especially in factory farming — a moral catastrophe by any measure — may not be primarily based on species. It may instead be the surviving remnant of something much older and much more general: the machinery of domination, capture, and extraction that built the first states and, for most of history, processed human and nonhuman bodies with striking indifference to what separates them. To support this conjecture, I turn to James C. Scott, whose work I started reading and appreciating in recent years. If I’m right, then “speciesism” may be the wrong target.

A world without speciesism that looks like ours

Imagine a population of humans who genuinely don’t care about species differences. They’re not enlightened antispeciesists, just indifferent. What they have is strength, cleverness, and appetite: enough of each to subjugate, control, and exploit whatever material resources can be made to yield a caloric surplus. What would they do?

They would seize any body weak enough to be put to work — prisoners of war, captives, convicts, and debtors. They would favor members of their own tribe — not out of respect for the species, but for boring game-theoretic evolutionary reasons: the adaptive advantage of cooperating inside the group outweighs whatever advantage there is in cooperating across groups. The expansion of the moral circle, and the recognition of a common humanity beyond kin altruism and ethno-linguistic division, are recent historical developments (see Singer, The Expanding Circle). These humans would also exploit animals, from wild game to livestock, for more or less the same reason they exploit conquered humans: animals are easy to dominate, and there’s nothing to gain from cooperating with them beyond what domestication already extracts. They may exploit animals more than they exploit humans, but again, because of the payoff structure. Subjugating humans may just be less efficient, and perhaps you want to preserve some commerce and fleeting alliances with neighboring groups (or at least merchants and the elite classes of such groups). Nothing in this world runs on species per se. This world looks a great deal like the world of the first states.

From antiquity through Hume and the social contract theorists up to Rawls, a recurring idea is that the “circumstances of justice” — the social and material conditions under which cooperation on fair terms becomes both necessary and possible — require moderate scarcity and rough equality of power. Where one party can wholly dominate another, justice is out of the question. Hume put it memorably:

Were there a species of creatures intermingled with men, which, though rational, were possessed of such inferior strength, both of body and mind, that they were incapable of all resistance, and could never, upon the highest provocation, make us feel the effects of their resentment; the necessary consequence, I think, is that we should be bound by the laws of humanity to give gentle usage to these creatures, but should not, properly speaking, lie under any restraint of justice with regard to them… This is plainly the situation of men, with regard to animals; and how far these may be said to possess reason, I leave it to others to determine. (An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals, 1751, III.i)

“Gentle usage” and “humanity” work as constraints on or guidelines against cruelty. But for Hume, this excludes obligations of justice and is entirely compatible with exploitation. His conjecture was, unfortunately, probably right: where domination is possible and cooperation unnecessary, domination is what we do to animals and, as history shows, to each other. Virtually all human societies throughout history have had some form of human bondage, servitude, or slavery; as late as 1800, according to an estimate Scott borrows from Adam Hochschild, roughly three-quarters of the world’s population lived in bondage of one kind or another (Against the Grain, 155). It is no more in our interest to cooperate with other species than with humans from other tribes, so long as we can dominate them and extract what we want from them. Hume might retort that I’m twisting his words and that the laws of humanity bind us, through moral sentiments, to our fellow creatures (i.e., humans) in most circumstances because we naturally realize our interests align. Circumstances of justice are not that rare. But if you also know Hume’s less-than-stellar record on slavery,1 you could think the opposite: we can definitely treat our fellow creatures without feeling bound to them by the laws of justice. What Hume describes as “plainly the situation of men, with regard to animals,” can also be fairly described as the situation of certain classes of men to other classes of men throughout history.

Against the grain

This is where one of my favorite authors of recent years comes in, the late James C. Scott. The political scientist and anthropologist who died in 2024 studied how states see, count, tax, and control their subjects, and how people evade them (with a focus on Southeast Asia). His book Against the Grain (2017) reconstructs the deep history of the earliest states in Mesopotamia. It can read, if you come to it from animal ethics, like a book about animals that happens to be about humans. And a little bit of the reverse, too. (His last, posthumous book, In Praise of Floods (2025), voices animal concerns much more explicitly.)

What did the first states actually care about? Scott’s famous account of statehood is found in his classic, Seeing Like a State (1998). For Scott, a state — a category that includes more than just sovereign political entities named “states,” but all forms of centralizing power-wielding institutions — is primarily concerned with making populations legible, that is, simplified, standardized, measurable, and countable from a centralized perspective. Seeing Like a State documents the various schemes that forestry managers, urbanists, politicians, educators, and consultants use in their respective domains to enforce legibility. Much of it is focused on modern history. In Against the Grain, Scott turns to deep history.

Why does legibility matter? Because a legible population is taxable, which is why early states were built on fixed grain agriculture. Grain ripens visibly, on a schedule, and above ground, so you can assess and confiscate it. In contrast, tubers, legumes, and root crops do not offer a tax collector the same convenience (Against the Grain, 123, 128–34). This is also why there is a close relationship between the emergence of writing and the emergence of the first states. As Scott notes, writing “seems to have been used in Mesopotamia essentially for bookkeeping purposes for more than half a millennium before it even began to reflect the civilizational glories we associate with writing” (140). Because the state’s survival ultimately depended on maintaining a concentration of bodies from which surplus could be extracted, the state sought to keep working populations concentrated where they could be measured and managed. It therefore built physical mechanisms of control, such as city walls, which, Scott argues, often functioned less to keep invaders out than to keep laborers in (138–39). Wars and raids against “barbarians” — hill peoples, hunter-gatherers, anyone outside the grain core — were basically manhunts, expeditions to restock the state with captive labor, better understood “in the light of slave raids than as conventional warfare” (157).

Strikingly, the scribes of Uruk used the same age and sex categories for laboring groups that they used for state-controlled herds; in the words of the archaeologist Guillermo Algaze (quoted by Scott), “such laborers were conceptualized as ’domesticated’ humans, wholly equivalent to domestic animals in status” (160).

One of Scott’s most striking ideas in Against the Grain is what he calls the late-Neolithic multispecies resettlement camp: the early agrarian settlement as a crowded, disease-ridden concentration of humans, cattle, sheep, pigs, and grain, all of them confined, all of them dependent, most of them worse off — smaller, sicker, shorter-lived — than their free-ranging counterparts (or than non-state peoples). Within this arrangement, the state did not sort its holdings by species but rather by use. Slaves, serfs, corvée laborers, and prisoners were managed with the same basic toolkit as herds: physical confinement, dietary control, and reproductive control. “The captives, individually and collectively, became an integral part of the state’s means of production and reproduction, a part, if you will, along with the livestock and grain fields of the state’s own domus” (181). Scott frames domestication itself as a general project of controlled reproduction extending across fire, plants, animals, slaves, state subjects, and women within the patriarchal family. As Scott describes the domestication of Homo sapiens, humans and animals alike became dependent on the agrarian-state complex, and both grew more docile and more governable. The intensifying technologies of surveillance, containment, and extraction that define state formation are thus applied to both human and nonhuman populations.2

Two qualifications are in order. First, on the timeline: domestication of plants and animals predates the first states by roughly four millennia, and sedentism itself predates domestication (44–45). “Clearly,” as Scott puts it, “our ancestors did not rush headlong into the Neolithic revolution or into the arms of the earliest states” (46). Some form of animal domination is older than the state, while some form of stable social organization around settlements is older than domestication. Moreover, our psychology suggests the human/animal divide may be older still — a highly conserved trait of our prehistory (see e.g., TJ Kasperbauer, Subhuman).

Second, the treatments were never identical: early states practiced controlled breeding and the systematic slaughter of young animals in ways that had no exact equivalent for enslaved humans. But this difference doesn’t show that species was the operative variable. Rather, control techniques were adapted to the biological and social characteristics of each exploited population. The motive — converting bodies into caloric surplus to feed the state’s population and enrich its ruling classes — was common; the modalities varied with the material at hand.

If my conjectures are right, then our treatment of animals is explained by mechanisms of control and practices of extraction rather than by moral distinctions between species. Defining speciesism as unequal treatment based on species obscures the actual causes and most of our history with them. What we call speciesism would be the inheritance of power structures that reach back to the origins of state civilization — a long history of dominating and producing bodies, human and nonhuman, of which the human portion has only recently (and incompletely) been repudiated by liberalism and the idea of human equality. The animals were left behind not because we drew a line at the species boundary, but because they’re the population we never stopped being able to profitably dominate.

In this story, we have almost never been speciesists.3

Dehumanization

That’s my basic Scottian argument. But there are two interesting objections I address in the paper that I want to briefly mention. Consider how we talk about despised humans: vermin, rats, cockroaches, beasts. Dehumanization — perceiving others as less than human — has greased the machinery of war, slavery, and genocide. Doesn’t it show that a species hierarchy underlies our moral psychology after all? To degrade someone, to incite hate and violence, we compare them to an animal. But this only works if animals are already below us in the hierarchy. So, the objection goes, haven’t we been speciesists for a long time?

I think the argument can be turned around. Notice, first, that we have always brutalized humans while knowing perfectly well they were human. The philosopher David Livingstone Smith, one of the leading theorists of dehumanization, observes that the sadism of the lynch mob — the rage, the humiliation, the crowd’s pleasure in maximizing suffering — is nothing like how people treat the animals they hunt and eat (Making Monsters, 2021). Ultimately, Smith argues, we don’t turn our victims into animals so much as into monsters: uncanny, threatening, sub-human and super-human at once. Paul Bloom has made a related point: recognizing a victim’s humanity can intensify cruelty, because the torturer savors precisely the capacities — for humiliation, terror, or shame — that he takes to be human. Dehumanization reveals less about our speciesism than about our cruelty toward our own kind.

Second, consider tribalism, which Jaquet himself invokes to explain the origins of speciesist intuitions (Jaquet 2022; Le pire des maux, 186–90). Tribalism operates, as he notes, both within human relations and in our interactions with animals. But then it is tribalism (the general phenomenon) that explains speciesism (the special case), and if the general mechanism is doing the explaining, in what sense are we distinctively speciesists, rather than creatures disposed to dominate, exploit, and appropriate whatever serves the material interests of a given community’s ruling coalition? Speciesism, in other words, is neither necessary nor sufficient to explain animal exploitation. Speciesism without material interests to exploit dissipates, while the capacity to exploit in the service of material interests doesn’t depend on species differences. “They’re just animals” thus functions as a pretext for exploiting animals as “they’re vermin” functions as a pretext for persecuting humans. The words don’t precede the material interests of the dominant group but simply reflect them.

A concession

A second objection concerns our psychology, which appears deeply disposed to partition the world into humans and non-humans — spontaneously, from early childhood, across cultures — and to attach a value hierarchy to that partition (Costello and Hodson 2014). This divide is ancient, near-universal, plausibly innate, and, as the moral psychology of the human/animal divide suggests, probably recalcitrant (Fischer et al. 2023). So Jaquet is right that a perception of animality does some explanatory work in our treatment of animals. My claim is that the treatment is likely overdetermined: even if we weren’t speciesists, we would probably still mistreat animals.

It is also possible that our ancient history selected for the recognition of other animals as different because they were available as protein-rich resources. If we apply Jaquet’s definition strictly, then a hominid who eats gazelles but not conspecifics comes out as a speciesist. But then we might worry about overgeneralization. Analogous adaptations would lead any predator (broadly construed to include omnivores) to partition the world into prey and non-prey. Our psychology does look a lot like the psychology of a speciesist, but it doesn’t track species difference so much as it carves the world into minded matter we can predict, control, appropriate, and consume, and embodied minds we can relate to on more or less equal (oftentimes much less than equal) terms. And all that may happen for the same basic reasons, namely, optimizing for survival and reproduction and, much later, flourishing and progress.

With all that said, there is promising evidence that children, despite drawing the human/animal line early, are markedly less “speciesist” (in the psychological, not behavioral sense) than adults (Wilks et al. 2021). Whatever entrenches the hierarchy, we’re not born with all of it. One more reason children are underrated.

The banality of evil

So are we speciesists? According to Jaquet’s definition, most of us are. We treat many other animals worse than we would treat humans, and we do so at least partly because they are animals. This widespread behavior, manifested at its worst in factory farming, constitutes speciesism. If that’s the terminology, then Jaquet is right. But once we’ve relabeled our behavior, what exactly have we explained? If history is any guide, it isn’t obvious that what leads us to torture billions of sentient creatures is uniquely explained by “species membership,” rather than by the power afforded to us by the state and technology. Our domination over nature is unlike any form of domination we’ve exerted over our fellow creatures. But this difference is not only extremely recent; it is also explained by the advantages of cooperating with our fellow creatures. I’m just not sure speciesism does much of the explanatory work.

The upshot is that the worst of evils (speciesism) is banal — in the sense of normal. It is a fact about social norms, or what most people do, and expect one another to do (see my brief and early attempt to make sense of this normality). The history of our species shows one constant: the systematic exploitation of dominated groups, human and nonhuman, and one recent divergence: exploiting humans became morally scandalous only a few centuries ago, an eyeblink in the history of our species, while exploiting animals remains almost universally accepted. A materialist explanation of that divergence doesn’t need speciesism but only the persistence of normalized practices where domination remains profitable and uncontested.

Why does all this terminological nitpicking matter? It matters to anyone who wants to change how animals are treated. If our attitudes are largely inert — if they are effects rather than causes of our practices — then the change won’t come primarily from education, argument, or consciousness-raising. The real problem may be that our psychology is anchored in social, economic, and political norms that normalize exploitation. And norms are the kind of thing that changes, not usually through persuasion, but through shifts in laws, prices, defaults, and institutions that make new behaviors ordinary, after which the attitudes tag along. Jaquet’s behavioral turn, whatever my quarrels with it, points in this direction — away from individual attitudes. On this, we converge.

The worst of evils, then, is the ruthless, state-enabled transformation of sentient beings into commodities, the most recalcitrant surviving form of a many-thousand-year history of domination, one that once processed human and animal bodies alike and now concentrates, at unimaginable industrial scale, on the animals. The good news is that species may matter less than it seems; the children suggest as much, and so does the deep history. The bad news is that what actually drives this moral catastrophe is much older, much more impersonal, and much better entrenched than a prejudice.

Edited for clarity on August 31, 2026, 3:30 PM

Plato, Republic

Recommended. There is very little I literally endorse, philosophically speaking, in Plato. But if you read it as comedy, peppered with fantasy, and perhaps all good comedy is philosophical in some sense, then it’s really, really great. Isn’t it weird? I almost never think like “Oh, you’re so right, Socrates,” unlike most of his interlocutors, and I find him very annoying. And yet it’s never boring—Aristotle, for instance, has a much better truth-to-content ratio, but he’s not fun!

Also, I don’t really know what this book is really about. Is it primarily about the city, the soul, or both? Does he really think philosophers can, let alone should, be kings? What’s with the constant use of myths, fables, and allegories, all the while ditching artistic representation and sophistry? Incredible book.

Also read for Political Philosophy, though not for the first time:

Niccolò Macchiavelli, The Prince

I love this book. This must be my fourth read, and I’m still amazed by the prose and the subtlety. Also good that you can read it in a few hours. The guy has got to be one of the most misunderstood men in history.

The Fun Ones

Kévi Donat, À la découverte du Paris Noir (2025)

An old friend who left public administration to give guided walking tours in Paris, gradually shifting his focus onto Black history (Kévi is from Martinique). A walk through Paris turns into a series of portraits of central Black figures in the arts, culture, and politics. Fascinating stuff. Well done, Kévi!

Gretel Ehrlich, The Solace of Open Spaces (1985)

“Wyoming has found its Whitman,” said the great nature writer Annie Dillard. High praise! Ehrlich is indeed a very good writer.

Personal memoir about ranching in Wyoming. Remarkable feat: discusses Wyoming’s landscapes without talking about Yellowstone (if I recall, there was one passing mention). Gorgeous prose, humor, and encounters with both self-effacing and larger-than-life characters.

Kyle Harper, The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire (2017)

I was teased by his fascinating interview with Dwarkesh Patel. The book is not quite as polished as one might hope, and I’ve already forgotten most of the dates, names, and facts, but it is a compelling account of the role of the Roman Empire’s ecology in its gradual decline and subsequent downfall.

Nathaniel Philbrick, Why Read Moby-Dick?

Mentioned in my previous post. A nice little companion to The Book. I suspect it works best as a reward for reading the book rather than a motivation for doing so. Just read Moby-Dick and then wonder why.

The Work Ones

Keeping up with the literature is hard, in animal ethics as elsewhere.

Karen Bradshaw, Wildlife as Property Owners: A New Conception of Animal Rights (2020)

Oddly structured, sometimes rushed, but the thesis is intriguing. A legal scholar’s case for granting property rights to animals—not as individuals but populations or species over their habitat. Bradshaw argues this is not only important for conservation but also politically feasible and more promising than traditional animal welfare approaches or relying on existing environmental law. Especially interesting is the discussion of the empirical evidence for precursors of ownership in animals.

Alasdair Cochrane and Mara-Daria Cojocaru, Solidarity with Animals: Promises, Pitfalls, and Potential (2024)

A mixed bag. Edited volume analyzing and extending the concept, history, and practice of solidarity to animals. Review forthcoming in The Quarterly Review of Biology.

Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka, Animals and the Right to Politics (2025)

The sequel to their magnum opus, Zoopolis (2011). Like its predecessor, this important book sets the agenda for future discussions of animals and politics. It’s heavy on the decolonial, anti-capitalist rhetoric, and not always successful on that front, but it’s chock-full of provocative visions for living with animals, domesticated, liminal, and wild, and upholding their political agency. Required reading for anyone interested in the topic.

Egon Bittner, The Functions of the Police in Modern Society (1970)

I’m writing a paper on animals and the police. I’d already read some policing literature for a seminar last year, but not this semi-obscure classic (his 1974 “Florence Nightingale in pursuit of Willie Sutton: A theory of police” seems to be more widely referenced).

Dry but also wry. Classic sociological account of what the police do (and are for). It’s not just about law enforcement, not even close.

Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups (1971)

I’m writing a paper based on my Substack essay, “Publishing Without Romance.”

It’s about public choice theory, so I read one of the foundational texts. A lucid, precise, and rigorous theoretical account, informed by political science and economics, of the emergence of groups to solve cooperation problems. When do individuals have incentives to bear some of the costs of supporting organizations such as unions? Collective action dynamics differ across groups of different sizes. Common interest alone is insufficient to generate cooperation, so compulsion may be required. In any case, incentives matter.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (2013)

I did an independent study on Indigenous philosophy with a student. I knew little and have learned a lot. We read some interesting papers and one book, which so many students had been mentioning for years. This was the opportunity. I was initially very reluctant. It turns out it’s not so bad. It’s too long, not so deep, and not very rigorous, but it’s not woo-woo or cheesy. Lots of interesting stories. Almost certainly overrated, but a good entry point into Traditional Ecological Knowledge.

C. Thi Nguyen, The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game (2026)

Everybody was talking about it! The hype! I had read much of his work and used some of it in my own, and we share an appreciation of James C. Scott. So I read it and met with a few colleagues to discuss it. You don’t need my summary. If you’re already suspicious of metrics and/or if you already like Nguyen, you won’t be disappointed. It’s often fun and at times inspiring.

I have (major) issues with his style, but that’s just me. More importantly, I wish he’d taken Scott seriously enough to at least consider that the case against institutionalized legibility should make you more skeptical of the state, even if the state dispenses many of the things your tribe deems essential.

Hannah Pickard, What Would You Do Alone in a Cage with Nothing but Cocaine? (2026)

I’m about halfway through. It’s great! I had read and really liked a few of her papers. I find her “Responsibility Without Blame” project extremely attractive, and it was even helpful when I wrote “Letting animals off the hook.” This is a book about addiction. Not the first, but as far as I can tell, the most systematic philosophical treatment of the topic by an expert with experience in the field. It’s committed to a humanistic and “psychology first” approach to addiction, against the dominant “brain disease” paradigm. It’s also deeply humane and compassionate. Extremely compelling so far. I don’t expect it to go off the rails in the remaining chapters.

That’s it for now, as far as nonfiction books are concerned. I’ll do another roundup near the end of the year.

The Big Ones

In my quest to fill some gaps in the classics, I’m pleased to report that I not only read but adored Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick or, The Whale, and Homer’s Odyssey (Emily Wilson’s translation). Both deserve their own posts, and I probably will get to writing something about Moby-Dick eventually, but let me just say these cannot be overrated. I don’t know why it took me so many years to finally get to them, but here I am.

I understand Cormac McCarthy better now that I’ve read Moby-Dick. This was famously his favorite novel, and legend has it he read it every year. I topped it with Billy Budd and the Piazza Tales, which includes absolute gems (“Benito Cereno” and the very Darwinian “The Encantadas” in particular, the latter of which should delight McCarthy fans).

I also understand my father better now. Coincidentally, this was also his favorite book. I don’t know how many different editions we had at home, too many if you ask my mother, but I vividly remember Melville’s famous late-life, bearded photograph standing on a shelf and asking what member of our family this person was. My father wanted to be a sailor and fisherman, but failed the vision tests (he was color-blind). He became a doctor instead and found proxies for his dream in literature, explorers’ tales, and bottled ships. I’ve never really loved the ocean. I don’t mind it and find it fascinating, but I feel more at ease in the mountains. However, I think I now understand my father’s dream better after reading Moby-Dick. And of course, I understand why he adored the book. (I can recommend Nathaniel Philbrick’s Why Read Moby-Dick?; it might make you read it or strengthen your appreciation for it, though it really is a little book.)

Both Moby-Dick and The Odyssey are sea voyages of literally epic proportions. Odysseus’s late revenge against the suitors doesn’t match Ahab’s obsessive, vengeful hunt for the white whale, but the gods (Athena, Poseidon, Helios, Zeus) exert vengeance repeatedly, and so do the suitors’ families at the end. Both show that meaning resides in things greater than ourselves, but so do danger and our inevitable destruction.

Some striking things about The Odyssey:

• It is full of crying and wailing—they’re not exactly wimps, obviously, so tears must have meant something profoundly different in Homeric times.

• Lots of people die. And that’s on top of the Trojan war, which The Iliad is about. Lots of those deaths are unnecessary, too. And yet you wouldn’t say life was cheap, because Odysseus and his men seem deeply affected by the loss of their comrades.

• It’s always funny when people make up stuff like romantic marriage and loving fathers are a recent invention. It’s cliché, but the poem reveals the near-universality of not just themes and tropes but also human attachments.

• I must have already read the Argos scene (or heard it so many times), and yet it was still immensely moving. Perhaps one of the most heartwrenching scenes of the whole poem. Yes, it’s about a dog, and I say that as a cat person.

• By the way, more animals than I would have expected, most of which have an important dramatic or symbolic role (as omens, notably). They eat some of them, but others you clearly shouldn’t mess with (e.g., Helios’ cattle).

• Sex—never explicitly stated but heavily implied. Likewise, lots of it, plus some highly erotic content (oiling, nymphs playing ball, frequent nudity).

I have nothing to compare Wilson’s translation to, but I found it highly readable and poetic. Her introduction and her notes are exceptionally helpful. I don’t understand the criticisms, and I honestly don’t care. Any translation is probably fine, and this one looked excellent to my uninformed eye. Your mileage may vary.

Of course, I also saw the movie—just yesterday, in fact—and enjoyed it. It’s not a great movie, but it’s spectacular, the actors are overall excellent, and the interpretation, as unfaithful as it is, is much less shallow than the pesky reviews and discourse pieces would make you think. Speaking of, yes, I did read Wilson’s LRB review and found it lacking in grace. There’s clearly something going on between Nolan and her that I’m missing, because there’s no way this movie deserves this mean of a review. Again, your mileage may vary.

Related podcasts

• “The Lotus Eaters”: Very Bad Wizards (David Pizarro and Tamler Sommers) mini-series on The Odyssey (for Patreon supporters; honestly a good reason to subscribe if you’re reading it).

• I’ve tried a few podcasts about Moby-Dick and haven't found one that really suits me. This new one, The Pequod Pod with Jonny Wiles, Meg Fancher, and Tristan Bavol-Marques, has been pretty good so far.

Other fiction

Ernest Hemingway, In Our Time

• One of Hemingway’s early collections of short stories, which nonetheless contains some of his best writing. Remarkable. The so-called “iceberg theory” sounds suspicious, but it really works wonders here.

Yuri Herrera, Kingdom Cons and The Transmigration of Bodies

• I had read Signs Preceding the End of the World and Season of the Swamp by this Mexican author that I’ve heard compared to McCarthy.

• These two are excellent too, very short, and impossible to do justice to here. Of the four, Signs may be the weirdest and most difficult, but the mood is consistently unique. They’re all translated from Spanish by Lisa Dillman, who seems to be doing a fantastic job.

Michel Houellebecq, Soumission

• Is it controversial? Yes. Is it a very good book? Yes. Is it Islamophobic? I don’t think so; in fact, I find it surprisingly full of grace towards Islam and Muslims, given what Houellebecq has said about both. Do we hear too much about the narrator’s sex life and genitals? Absolutely.

Alan Moore, Watchmen

• I am not in comic books, let alone superheroes. But based on a few colleagues’ recommendations, I gave it a try. I liked it more than I expected, especially the visual craft. The narrative is okay, the dialogue overall pretty bad (but some of the interludes are pretty good), the ideas are meh. Will I read more Alan Moore? Not in the near future. Am I glad I read it? Sure!

Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

• One of the most uncomfortable works of genius I have encountered. First of all, what a writer! And the humor. But also, how tactfully does Nabokov bring the reader to the edge of adopting the wrong perspective, drawing the wrong interpretation, succumbing to the narrator’s tricks and deception! Most importantly, given the subject, no moralizing or didacticism whatsoever.

W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz

• A doozie. Gorgeous prose (translated from German by Anthea Bell), artfully embedded narration, and some extremely insightful reflections on places, architecture, and memory.

Robert Seehaler, The Last Movement

• A fine (but too short to be excellent) fictionalized account of Mahler at the end of his life. Mahler comes across as difficult but vulnerable, a genius but humane. Translated from German by Charlotte Collins.

Jeff VanderMeer, The Southern Reach Series (Annihilation, Authority, Acceptance)

• I initially thought this was a trilogy. But then, when at last I finished the third book, I realized there was a (more recent) fourth volume (Absolution). I guess I’ll have to read, despite not loving the ones I read. It’s clearly top-tier science fiction, but I find Vandermeer a bit too self-indulgent and undisciplined with his prose and the characters insufficiently authentic. Fans disagree, but I found Authority and Acceptance to be too long for what they had to offer. Hence my apprehension when it comes to a fourth, even longer volume.

• Still, the atmosphere of Area X, the abandoned coastal wilderness off the Florida coast (inspired by St. Marks NWR near Tallahassee), is mysterious and sublime enough to warrant reading.

Andy Weir, Project Hail Mary

• We wanted to see the movie, so I picked up the book; it had been on my shelf for years. It’s lots of fun, and I enjoyed the nerdy science stuff. Weir wants to make the universe coherent and show you he understands engineering. He’s a better narrative engineer than a writer, but given my sparse sci-fi consumption, I found it decent. The movie was good too, but not great, and inferior to the novel (props to Ryan Gosling and Rocky, though).

In progress

Zora Neale Hurston, And Their Eyes Were Watching God

• Tender, raw, ingenious, and daring, but I’ll be honest, the dialect slows the reading down a lot.

Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers

• So far so good. Good writing, fun characters.

What follows is a theory I’m not sure I endorse. It may be too cynical to be true.

In 2018, I was fortunate to audit Saul Levmore’s Public Choice at the University of Chicago Law School, a hotbed of law and economics. One insight I took away: When considering any regulation or policy, we can ask, whose interests does it serve? Who stands to benefit from shaping market forces and social behavior more broadly?

Sometimes, the answer is the public interest. Sometimes it’s simply what voters want, and in a democracy, lawmakers ought to honor the people’s will. In most such cases, which one hopes would cover most policymaking, rules coordinate behavior and align incentives with desired social outcomes. The core insight of public choice theory comes from economics: incentives matter. People respond to incentives, so even legislation aimed at promoting the public interest must consider how individuals will actually behave. Most people are not guided by the public interest in their everyday behavior, and they are unlikely to understand how to promote it—hence the need for mechanisms of social coordination.

Many public choice theorists believe that markets generally offer the most efficient mechanisms for promoting social welfare. However, aside from the most hardcore libertarians, most people believe that some regulations are necessary to prevent, if not market failures, at least antisocial and rights-violating behavior, or to deliver certain goods and services. Markets can’t solve crime, and even most economists agree they cannot satisfactorily provide public goods such as national defense, streetlights, or clean air. Public goods are available to all, such that normal market competition fails to price them adequately. Usually, they need to be supported collectively through taxation. Nevertheless, it is worthwhile to ask who stands to benefit from certain rules, for not all rules serve the public interest. This approach can illuminate ostensibly innocuous or even beneficial policies that, upon closer examination, prove to be misguided. It may sound cynical, but cynical behavior requires a cynical analysis.

I aim to apply this framework to current debates about AI tools, specifically large language models and image generators, in academic research. The leading journal Ethics recently implemented a new AI policy clarifying the scope of legitimate AI use in authoring submissions. The journal’s editors should be commended for attempting to address a genuine problem: the misuse, overuse, and abuse of AI tools in academic research. AI-restrictive policies seem reasonable in a rapidly evolving context. Many journals are inundated with fully AI-generated submissions and reviews, many of which may violate intellectual property, privacy, and established norms of academic integrity. Clearly, some new policies are required. But before examining the policy closely, a few words about public choice.

What is Public Choice?

Public choice theory is a research program or framework developed by economists and political scientists, including Kenneth Arrow (of Impossibility Theorem fame), James Buchanan, Gordon Tullock, and Mancur Olson. In The Logic of Collective Action, Olson explained how small, organized interest groups can successfully lobby for “wrong-headed” rules that benefit them at the expense of a large, unorganized group (like the general public).

Public choice applies economic analysis to the study of political behavior. Rather than assuming politicians, bureaucrats, and voters act as selfless public servants pursuing some abstract public interest, public choice treats them as rational (if partially ignorant) actors pursuing their own interests within political institutions. The theory doesn’t treat people as purely selfish; instead, it posits that they respond predictably to incentives, and that institutional design must account for this reality.

Public choice sheds light on how regulations actually operate, as opposed to how their proponents claim they do. Understanding these principles helps us see patterns across seemingly disparate policy domains—from occupational licensing to zoning laws to, as I’ll argue, academic publishing policies.

The following principles of public choice will be important:

• Concentrated benefits, dispersed costs: Special interest groups succeed because they reap concentrated benefits from policies while costs are spread thinly across many people. Farmers lobby intensely for subsidies that cost each taxpayer a few dollars but save the industry millions of dollars. The industry organizes and mobilizes; individual taxpayers barely notice.

• Regulatory capture occurs when interest groups directly or indirectly control a regulatory apparatus, resulting in regulations (or the lack thereof) that tend to serve the interests of incumbents rather than consumers or the public. This is true at the legislative and agency regulatory levels, as well as within professions. Government officials may attempt to prioritize their own interests over the public interest. Medical licensing boards staffed by physicians restrict entry to the profession in ways that protect existing practitioners’ incomes more than they protect patient safety.

• Rent-seeking: Individuals and groups compete for government or institutional favors that protect them from normal market competition. Rather than creating value through productive activity, rent-seekers expend resources to secure special privileges—such as occupational licenses, protective regulations, subsidies, and favorable tax treatment—that enable them to extract value from others while creating significant social inefficiencies. According to “Tullock’s Paradox,” rent-seekers will spend resources to pursue special privileges at a lower cost than the value of the privilege to them.

• Deadweight loss: Regulations that prevent mutually beneficial transactions create deadweight loss—the loss of economic efficiency when equilibrium is not achieved. Price controls, red tape, or licensing requirements can reduce innovation, ultimately increase prices, and prevent interested agents from completing transactions that would have made everyone better off.

While most people act in ways they believe promote the public interest, public choice teaches us that we cannot ignore the rational self-interest of those shaping the rules. How could this apply to academic publishing? When examining a new AI policy, we must ask whether these restrictions are primarily intended to safeguard the public good of knowledge or scholarly integrity, or whether they serve as a barrier to entry. Where a policy forces researchers to spend their efforts avoiding efficient AI tools just to satisfy a legacy gatekeeping model, Tullock would predict stagnation—resources are wasted on unproductive activity. The cynical (or public choice) interpretation is that policies can result from rent-seeking activity (protecting the status and scarcity of human-only labor).

When applying this framework to academic publishing, we can distinguish between two distinct types of goods. Knowledge itself is a public good—it’s non-excludable (once published, ideas spread beyond any paywall) and non-rivalrous (my reading Rawls doesn’t prevent you from reading Rawls). However, publication in a top-tier journal like Ethics is also a positional good; it is highly rivalrous and strictly excludable. Public choice theory suggests that while a journal’s stated mission is to facilitate the intellectual public good, the actors within that system—editors, reviewers, and authors—have a rational incentive to protect the scarcity and “rent” of their positional status. When we examine AI-restrictive policies, we are looking for this friction: does the policy prioritize the efficient production of knowledge, or does it serve as a barrier to entry that protects the value of traditional human capital?

What About Journals?

So cui bono? Who stands to benefit from AI-restrictive policies? Potential candidates include readers, authors, editors, academic institutions (for hiring, tenure, and promotion purposes), and the broader public—including taxpayers who fund much academic research through grants and public universities.

In economic terms, published philosophical work functions largely as a public good. This creates the classic public goods problem: markets tend to under-provide such goods because individual actors can’t fully capture the value they create. Hence, we need (in part) public funding of research and universities. However, while knowledge is a public good, journal prestige is an excludable positional good that publishers and/or editors may be trying to protect through AI restrictions.

If journals exist to provide the public good of philosophical understanding, we can ask: What institutional arrangements best serve that goal? Just because markets under-provide public goods doesn’t mean guild-like regulation will be optimal. Public choice says: the people tasked with providing public goods also respond to incentives, and those incentives may conflict with maximizing social welfare. When AI threatens to dramatically reduce the cost of producing philosophical research, scholars have concentrated interests in delegitimizing AI assistance to preserve their funding stream—from grants to salaries—while taxpayers and students bear the dispersed costs of supporting potentially less efficient research.1

In the last couple of years, major publishers and many academic journals have adopted policies surrounding AI use for research, writing, editing, and reviewing. Today, I just want to focus on Ethics.

The Ethics Policy

As noted, the new Ethics policy, while flawed in my view, addresses a real problem. Other journals may experiment with different policies. Let a thousand flowers bloom as we figure it out—the same goes for AI policies in our syllabi; I know I’m revising mine every term. Also to their credit, the editors of Ethics are doing a thankless job and publishing some of the best work in ethics, as well as in legal, political, and social philosophy. It’s a premier journal. It will publish some duds, but you’re practically guaranteed to find cutting-edge philosophy, on top of hundreds of classics, in its pages.

Now on to the policy. As the Ethics website now states, “things are moving so fast that the editors have no hope of anticipating all relevant changes to both the AI tools themselves and the professional norms and practices governing their use. We would, nevertheless, be remiss if we didn’t provide some guidance.” The principles that contributors are expected to comply with are the following (emphasis in bold is mine):

AI tools cannot author or even co-author a submission. Authors and co-authors must take full moral and legal responsibility for their submissions; they must take responsibility for the assertions that they make, the arguments that they proffer, and the sources that they cite or fail to cite. Since AI tools cannot take responsibility, Ethics will not consider submissions that have been authored or co-authored by an AI.

Authors must never take credit for work that’s not their own. Taking sentences of text from a generative AI tool and presenting them as your own words is plagiarism—at least, insofar as we take plagiarism to be a form of intellectual dishonesty in which one takes credit for work that’s not one’s own. Using generative AI to come up with a list of objections to a thesis or argument and presenting them as your own is also plagiarism. Consequently, authors who use text, images, or other content generated by an AI in their submission must be transparent about this, disclosing which tools were used and how. In cases where an original human source cannot be identified, authors should, then, include something like the following note: “I first became aware of this objection through the use of ChatGPT, OpenAI, April 16, 2025, https://chat.openai.com/chat.”

It’s important not only that authors avoid taking credit for work that is not their own but also that they give credit where credit is due. The problem with merely citing an AI tool—say, as the source of an example or objection—is that the AI tool may not be the original source. The original source may instead be an author whose work was used to train that AI tool. Thus, attributing some example or objection to ChatGPT could be just as problematic as attributing an objection to your colleague when all they did was tell you about some objection that Rawls raised. Thus, authors may need to track down the original source of an example or objection generated by an AI tool and cite it.

The editors of Ethics value human creativity; we, therefore, value work that presents the author’s own original ideas and insights more than work that presents ideas and insights that don’t originate with the author. For this reason, content that does not originate with the author may be deemed less desirable and publishable—at least, other things being equal.

Let’s unpack this.

Authors must disclose “which tools were used and how.” This sounds like simple transparency. But required disclosure is to be paired with the assumption that “content that does not originate with the author may be deemed less desirable and publishable.” Even if your AI-assisted work is excellent—even if it advances understanding more than purely human work—it arrives marked as suspect, “less desirable,” by virtue of its provenance.

Compare this to how we treat other tools. Philosophers typically don’t disclose their use of reference management software, university library databases, Google Scholar, PhilPapers, and many casual conversations with colleagues, let alone students, may go unmentioned. These tools are unmarked and presumed to be legitimate. The disclosure requirement for AI singles it out as requiring special justification. This asymmetry suggests that the policy regulates production methods, not content.

The policy imposes a hefty burden: “authors may need to track down the original source of an example or objection generated by an AI tool and cite it.” The rationale: AI tools draw on training data, so citing ChatGPT is akin to citing your colleague when the actual source is Rawls. This requirement sounds principled, but it becomes absurd in practice. First, it creates a massive transaction cost, losing much of the efficiency gains afforded by AI. Furthermore, AI systems are trained on ungodly amounts of text. When ChatGPT generates an objection, there may be no single “original source”—the objection might recombine, in a truly novel way, elements from dozens of disparate works. Demanding that authors track down sources that may not exist, or that would require examining the AI’s entire training corpus, makes substantial AI use effectively impossible. When a colleague mentions an objection, we can ask, “Where did you encounter that?” and trace it back to its source. AI systems don’t work that way—they’re statistical models that generate text based on patterns in training data, not retrieval systems that copy specific sources. Web-based research mode may rely on specific sources, but it typically reveals its sources. In this respect, it is more akin to an article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (caveat: for now, the latter remains incomparably better and more reliable). In sum, demanding traditional attribution for AI-generated content either imposes a framework that reveals a misunderstanding of the technology or treats it unjustifiably as being different in kind from traditional research tools.

The policy illustrates the “indirect damage” Tullock feared. From a public choice perspective, the requirement to systematically track down the sources of every AI-generated objection creates an artificial barrier to entry and functions as a tax on efficiency in the name of integrity. By mandating that AI-assisted researchers perform redundant manual labor, the journal protects the competitive advantage of scholars who either can access their own external repository of knowledge (e.g., research assistants) or do not want to be placed at a competitive disadvantage because they lack the skills to use AI. The policy effectively “rents” the prestige of the journal only to those willing to pay the price of inefficient, legacy research methods.

The policy states “AI tools cannot author or co-author a submission” because they cannot “take full moral and legal responsibility.” If authorship is fundamentally about taking responsibility for claims, then yes, only humans qualify. But if journals exist to publish the best philosophical work—the most truth-conducive, the most insightful, the most technically sophisticated—then authorship could simply signal provenance, independently of credit. A cynic could say that the principle ensures that reputational capital remains tied exclusively to human actors within the existing prestige hierarchy. But we could have systems where humans take responsibility while acknowledging AI contributions transparently, without devaluing their work. The current policy forecloses this possibility by treating authorship as necessarily tied to academic credit while explicitly stating that work “that does not originate with the author” is “less desirable and publishable” regardless of its quality.

This reveals a guild-like logic. The policy protects a system in which research must be produced through traditional human cognitive labor to be considered valuable. It prioritizes process over outcomes, valuing the preservation of traditional skills over the advancement of understanding. And it does so under the banner of responsibility and academic integrity—just as doctors invoke patient safety when restricting nurse practitioners from performing procedures they’re competent to handle.

What is the central mission of a journal? To publish the best philosophical output, measured by truth, understanding, or originality? To maintain conversation between authors, critics, and readers? To act as credentialing institutions doling out academic credit usable as currency for jobs, grants, merit raises, tenure, and promotion? All of the above?

If we take seriously the first possibility—that journals should publish the best work by standards of truth, understanding, or originality—then we must ask: What if AI assistance could produce better philosophy?2 Not by replacing but by enhancing human thinking, by helping articulate arguments more clearly, exploring new ideas, identifying relevant literature more comprehensively, spotting logical gaps, or exploring conceptual space more systematically. If journals are in the business of publishing the best and most important work, they should be mostly indifferent to how that work was produced, provided it meets their substantive standards and commits no fraud or academic dishonesty. And even if we value human conversation, as I do, why should journals necessarily host it? Why should they restrict themselves to such conversation? And why would conversation itself—independently of its output—be publicly supported, when many other equally valuable activities are not?

The Public Choice Analysis

Deadweight Loss, Rent-Seeking, and Other Terrible Things

The policies professional journals adopt determine the payoff structure of choices authors can make. Assume some AI tools can significantly improve a manuscript or lead to genuine insights that (1) would not otherwise be possible and (2) satisfy assessment criteria for quality or importance. Authors who care about delivering the best work and having it published in leading journals may think using such tools warrants it, simply because their ends are better served this way. If journals are homes for the best or most important work, we should worry if journals bar publication of such work.

Restrictive policies could lead journals to publish suboptimal work.3 Because authors respond to incentives, not just a desire for truth or understanding, some will refrain from using AI tools and miss out on ways to make their work better. A graduate student who could use AI to help structure a complex argument, identify connections across literatures they haven’t fully mastered, or draw finer distinctions might produce superior work. But if journal policies stigmatize AI use or require extensive disclosures that editors view suspiciously, authors face strong incentives to forgo the tools, producing work that’s demonstrably their own but suboptimal relative to what they could have produced.

It may be better for students’ training not to use generative AI tools, but the role of journals is not to police graduate students’ training. Schools can enforce their own policies. If an author’s status should not be revealed to editors and reviewers, such considerations should remain irrelevant to the assessment of a submission.

Because similar incentives are widely shared and authors compete in the credit economy (for jobs, publications, grants), AI policies shape individual and collective behavior. With AI-restrictive policies, we may end up with a large body of suboptimal work. Most published work will still be excellent—there’s no shortage of brilliant work in philosophy journals. But why think we’ve reached a ceiling? By widely adopting overly restrictive policies, the profession may collectively produce less truth, less understanding than it could.

Restrictive AI policies, enacted within a specific institutional apparatus, are likely to serve some interests. But it’s not obvious that in the current and (more importantly) future AI landscape, the interests served align with what philosophers claim to care about: truth and understanding. Even if we believe that human dialogue and conversation are intrinsically valuable aspects of the philosophical enterprise (as I do), they are not our only goals. We also care about truth and understanding. Nor should we claim these ends necessarily require the dialogical part. It shouldn’t be too hard to imagine philosophical outputs that stand on their own terms and help us see the world anew or solve problems long thought intractable (say, on consciousness or in population ethics). Just because we’ve been accustomed to philosophical insights being produced by conversing human beings doesn’t mean it’s the only way. If we grant that even marginally better philosophical insights could be produced by AI, in ways either non-substitutable or very inefficient without AI assistance, AI-restrictive policies will create deadweight loss.

We can visualize it through a standard supply-and-demand model. When a journal imposes high-friction AI rules (the “tax”), it effectively shifts the supply curve of research upward by imposing a kind of regulatory tax on efficiency. The resulting loss (represented by the small triangle under the demand curve) is the cost society incurs for protecting traditional scholarship over the efficient production of knowledge. Here is a standard graph illustrating the concept:

Other principles also apply to the discussion:

• Concentrated benefits, dispersed costs: Established philosophers benefit from policies that privilege traditional methods. They preserve the value of skills they’ve spent careers developing, as well as the funding model that supports their careers. Meanwhile, costs are dispersed across readers who miss out on potentially superior work and junior scholars and non-native speakers who might leverage AI to compensate for their disadvantages.

• Regulatory capture: Academic journals function as both producers and regulators of philosophical work. The people writing AI policies—editors, editorial board members, established scholars—are the same people whose human capital and professional status might be threatened by AI.

• Rent-seeking: Restrictive AI policies allow established scholars to use institutional power to preserve the value of their traditional skills by restricting access to tools that might optimize philosophical production.

In sum, by enforcing high-friction AI rules, journal editors are not protecting the public’s access to knowledge, but rather the scarcity of the journal’s stamp of approval. Public choice theory reveals that the “rent” here is the maintenance of a high-effort barrier, which ensures that only those with traditional, high-cost human capital can compete. As Tullock would argue, when we prioritize the protection of this status-rent over the efficient production of knowledge, we intentionally choose stagnation over progress.

The Guild

Standard objections to AI use concern authenticity, academic integrity, or proper attribution of credit. These concerns are legitimate, much like “protecting consumers from unqualified practitioners” sounds legitimate when doctors advocate restrictive licensing. We can think of professions implementing internal policies as guilds. Think of doctors and lawyers imposing lengthy training requirements and restricting who can perform routine services—requirements going far beyond what’s needed to ensure basic competency. Or the hotel industry opposing Airbnb, cab drivers opposing rideshare services like Uber or Lyft, or self-driving taxis like Waymo. Or real estate agents lobbying for laws preventing homeowners from easily selling properties without their services. What we have are special interest groups lobbying for regulations—capture—under the guise of quality control, consumer protection, or public safety, while primarily serving their own interests and depriving customers of valuable services or lower costs by restricting supply.

Whatever you think of Waymo vs. regular taxis or Airbnb vs. traditional hotels, or cheaper, qualified foreign-trained lawyers vs. guild-approved lawyers or doctors, many people value those services but don’t use them because they’re outlawed, unavailable, or too expensive. A scheme of social coordination whose principal effect is to raise prices (for consumers) and barriers to entry (for graduates and job seekers) cannot be socially optimal. Especially when we ask whose interests it serves, and the answer is obviously the very interest group that actively lobbied for those special regulations.

The pattern is consistent: established practitioners use quality concerns as a pretext for restrictions primarily serving their economic interests. Crucially, such rent-seeking restrictions create both deadweight losses (services that would have benefited both parties don’t occur) and opportunity costs (talented individuals who could have contributed are excluded).

Now, let me draw an imperfect analogy with the corners of our profession in charge of regulating the credit economy. By “credit economy,” I mean the system where academic publications (alongside citations, awards, and other units of prestige) function as currency that scholars accumulate and exchange for professional advancement. Publications, especially in prestigious journals, are “credits” that can be spent on jobs, tenure, promotions, grants, and salary increases. Authors compete to accumulate credits, while journals act as gatekeepers controlling the supply of credits. In this framework, publications are not just about disseminating ideas but also about professional capital in a competitive system.

You may be part of that guild. I am—I write, present, submit, and referee papers. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with being part of a guild. But merely by being part of a guild, you have some special interests that may not perfectly align with the interests of those outside the guild.

Most guild members are individuals whose human capital is invested in skills such as close reading, analysis of complex ideas, rigorous argumentation, and the patient craft of polished writing. These skills serve valuable epistemic ends, but they can also be bound up with our self-conceptions as philosophers. Because for many, this self-conception precludes the use of crutches and values authenticity and autonomy, it tends to respond negatively to a different way of playing the game. Some of us have a vested interest in preserving a system that values those skills to the exclusion of crutches, even if the crutches could help produce better philosophy. But if we agree that philosophy is not just a game (where crutches are cheating), if it seeks goods beyond its own practice, then the guild’s reluctance to embrace crutches may be questioned.

Most journal editors care deeply about philosophy. However, if journals serve as providers of a public good—advancing philosophical understanding—then their policies should maximize that good. The question is whether restrictive AI policies serve that goal or protect guild interests at the expense of better scholarship. Public choice theory predicts that even well-intentioned actors will adopt policies serving their interests when institutional incentives are misaligned with their stated mission. These guild members may not be consciously protecting their turf. You may genuinely care about academic integrity, the value of human creativity, or the harms caused by AI companies. You may even think AI compromises the quality of philosophical work—though if that’s the case, we don’t need a policy; bad work will be weeded out through regular refereeing. But you may also fear being displaced by AI. You respond to incentives. We all do.

Another Source of Anxiety

There is a different framing of roughly the same problem that was suggested to me by Dustin Crummett. Funding for research, from grants to salaries, depends on convincing taxpayers, students, and private organizations that funding human research is sufficiently valuable. If AI could produce comparable research much more efficiently, this entire funding stream would be threatened. The government owes taxpayers, and universities owe students, a good reason for subsidizing inefficient researchers. The primary reason for subsidizing research should be the pursuit of truth, understanding, and contributions to social welfare—not the preservation of a particular worthwhile mode of production. Scholars understandably worry about their livelihoods (I do); therefore, they have an incentive to delegitimize AI-assisted work.

The Other Side of Cui Bono

Public choice analysis cuts both ways. If we should be skeptical when journal editors claim restrictive AI policies protect philosophical integrity, we should be equally skeptical when AI companies claim permissive policies advance knowledge.

OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and other AI companies have a vested interest in the widespread adoption of their tools. They benefit directly from normalizing AI use in academia: every philosopher who relies on ChatGPT or Claude is a potential subscriber, and every published paper acknowledging AI assistance is free advertising. The companies’ rhetoric about “democratizing access to knowledge” or “accelerating scientific discovery” may be sincere, but it’s also excellent marketing.

Moreover, AI companies face incentives that may conflict with the public interest. They benefit from creating dependency on their tools, even if that dependency erodes scholars’ traditional skills: I may produce better writing while becoming a worse writer. They profit from academics uploading manuscripts and research ideas into their systems, providing valuable training data, regardless of intellectual property implications (unless one runs the model locally or trusts models like Claude’s opt-out feature). They gain from shifting academic work toward tasks AI handles well (broad research, prose generation) and away from tasks it handles poorly (genuine innovation, accurate citations), even if this shift doesn’t optimize for good philosophy.

There are other legitimate concerns that restrictive policies attempt to address, besides privacy, intellectual property, and skill erosion—such as labor displacement, future energy use, and concentration of power. Moreover, if publishing requires access to the best AI tools, and those tools are expensive or proprietary, we shift the barrier to entry rather than eliminating it. The guild’s concerns about integrity, authenticity, and human creativity reflect genuine anxieties about what might get lost. The problem is that guild-like structures create institutional incentives to weight these concerns heavily while discounting potential benefits, just as AI companies have incentives to do the reverse.

Conclusion

Public choice theory doesn’t tell us that guilds are bad and markets good, or that regulation always serves special interests. It tells us people respond to incentives, and we should design institutions that align those incentives with our goals.

If our goal is to advance philosophy, we must ask: What institutional arrangements best serve this goal? This is harder than “Whose motives are purer?” or “Who should we trust?” Neither journal editors nor AI company executives are disinterested parties. Both have mixed motives—genuine concern for their stated mission combined with responses to incentives.

The question is whether restrictive AI policies actually protect the values journals claim to serve, or whether they protect guild-like interests at the expense of philosophical progress. And whether permissive policies actually advance knowledge, or advance corporate interests at the expense of scholarly integrity.

My central—perhaps overly cynical—claim has been that current restrictive policies are suboptimal, but that doesn’t mean unconditional permission is optimal either. We need policies that:

• Allow scholars to use AI when it genuinely improves their work

• Require genuine transparency about AI use without stigmatizing it

• Evaluate work primarily on its contribution to understanding, not its production method

Our admittedly tentative approach fails these criteria because editors’ institutional position creates incentives to over-weight production constraints. Recognizing this doesn’t mean embracing whatever serves the interests of AI companies, but thinking carefully about what institutional design would actually serve philosophy.

Disclosure: I used Claude Sonnet 4.5 (claude.ai/chat) and Gemini 3 (gemini.google.com/app) to gather information about AI policies across publishers, spell out an analysis of guild behavior in Public Choice, generate some examples, solicit input on language and organization, and proofread multiple drafts for spelling, grammar, clarity, and consistency. I also used Wikipedia, a laptop computer, a word processor, Grammarly, caffeine, remote memories, and feedback from Dustin Crummett.

2025 writing

The essay I put the most thought and heart into was on nature, suffering, Herzog, and McCarthy.

It was difficult but fun to write about musical fugues, and a good pretext to share some mind-bending music.

My short post on bats got lots of attention, somewhat unexpectedly. It’s based on one of those “fun facts” I keep talking about in class.

2025 reading

I left out many excellent posts, but here goes, organized alphabetically by author's last name:

1. Evan Goldfine, 37 takeaways from 200 hours with Bach

2. Daniel Greco, How to cheat the thief of joy

3. Ethan Iverson, The greatest jazz piano albums of all time

4. Victor Kumar, The last of us (against population decline)

5. Jac Mullen on AI and literacy: How to do soul-craft with state tools and The loom and the weavers

6. Daniel Muñoz, What police owe the people (a review of Jake Monaghan’s book)

   1. Bonus: live conversation between Daniel and Jake

7. Elena Reiziger’s profiles of great composers: Death of a prodigy (Mozart) and Rêverie (Schubert)

8. Misha Valdman, A theory of aging

9. Dan Williams, On highbrow misinformation

10. In Memoriam, Helen De Cruz’s last post

Wondering Freely

Can’t take it with you

I am in hospice care and reflecting a lot on what a good life is. Writing is hard, this will take me days rather than just one morning or afternoon. But I want to share these thoughts. You can’t take it with you, yet we often feel ourselves immortal and act as if we can…

Read more

a year ago · 565 likes · 79 comments · Helen De Cruz

Classical (released in 2025)

1. Víkingur Ólafsson, Opus 109. Structured around the key of E (major and minor): Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas, Op. 90 (neglected gem) & Op. 109 (one of the bangers from the late period), Bach’s Partita No. 6, and Schubert’s Piano Sonata, D. 566. A superstar now but he does not disappoint; while his sound is a tad too soft to my ears—on all his albums—this is an original and compelling ‘proposition’, though the centerpiece, Opus 109, is not even the best part of it to me.

2. Chris Thile, Bach: Sonatas and Partita, Vol. 2 (the long awaited second volume of the incredible Thile on the mandolin; virtuosic, singing, dancing, reinventing Bach like Bach would have loved).

3. Martin Fröst, B.A.C.H. (gorgeous arrangements by a premier clarinetist).

4. Francesco Tristano, Bach: The English Suites and Bach: The 7 Toccatas (a young pianist with a distinctive style; these two are more successful than his partitas; the prelude to suite No. 2 is fire).

5. Salomé Gasselin, Mystères (arrangements for viol da gamba, gambas, and organ of Bach and Biber works; I like to think the late Helen de Cruz would have found it wonderful).

6. Tiffany Poon, Nature (this could have been gimmicky but is very well done; French composers, from the Baroque era to the 20th century, on the piano; playful and meditative).

7. Shani Diluka, Renaissance (a stunning journey from Renaissance to Baroque composers, on the piano).

8. Alice Sara Ott, John Field - Complete Nocturnes (allegedly the inventor of the nocturne, beautiful sound, lovely miniature pieces).

9. Timothy Ridout, Telemann - Bach - Britten - Shaw (gorgeous viola and a very interesting programme).

Classical (more or less recent)

1. Beethoven, String Quartets, Op. 59 (‘Razumovsky’). The first three of the ‘Middle Quartets’, where Beethoven really starts pushing the boundaries. I spent hours on the bus listening to those three quartets. I like recent recordings by Doric String Quartet but also Takács and Cleveland.

2. Mahler, Symphonies. No. 2 (‘Resurrection’) and No. 6 were also frequent companions on my bus rides. Either Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic or the Berlin Philharmoniker collection with various conductors.

3. Dvorák, Symphonies 7, 8, 9 (Czech Philharmonic & Semyon Bychkov). I like this orchestra a lot (e.g., the Mahler symphonies). This made be appreciate works I used to neglect.

4. Mozart, Piano Concertos. This year my favorite recordings were by the inimitable Mitsuko Ushida with English Chamber Orchestra & Jeffrey Tate.

5. I’ve written about Haydn’s appreciation of Mozart, the most famous of which was expressed when he first heard Mozart’s so-called “Haydn Quartets”. Haydn himself, “the father of the string quartet,” practically standardized the form and produced some of its loveliest works in the classical era. You can’t beat Beethoven’s string quartets, but I do think some of Haydn’s quartets beat some of Mozart’s. I enjoyed two series of recordings by Doric String Quartet and the Dudok Quartet Amsterdam. Opp. 20 (early) and 76 (late) are two sets of quartets each remarkable in their own right, full of invention and beauty.

6. I’m returning to Bach’s Six Partitas for Piano (BWV 825-830), which I listened to a lot when I was much younger. For a long time, they maintained some bittersweet associations that prevented repeated listening but have now faded. I’ve enjoyed Zhu Xiao-Mei’s album and Martha Argerich’s classic recording of the Partita No. 2 in C minor (the album also includes my favorite English Suite and Toccata!).

7. Some of the best recordings of Mozart’s Symphonies are with Sir Charles Mackerras and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra

   1. Nos. 29, 31 (“Paris”), 32, 35 (“Haffner”), and 36 (“Linz”) — I think No. 35 is especially underrated

   2. Nos. 38-41 — no comment

Jazz (released in 2025)

1. Kurt Rosenwinkel & Jean-Paul Brodbeck, The Brahms Project (I liked their Chopin project; my favorite guitarist, who, like Brad Mehldau, keeps reinventing himself)

2. Brad Mehldau, Ride Into the Sun (one of the most important living jazzmen plays Elliot Smith and manages to not make you want to kill yourself. Very well done. I dig the woodwinds)

3. John Patitucci, Spirit Fall (ft. Chris Potter and Brian Blade) (you can’t go wrong with a lineup like this; just first-rate jazz)

4. Sullivan Fortner, Southern Nights (trio with Peter Washington and Marcus Gilmore; Fortner was a regular pianist in Roy Hargrove’s band, a solid sideman, he’s been on the rise for a while but might be reaching his zenith)

Jazz (more or less recent)

1. Kurt Rosenwinkel, The Next Step Band: Live at Smalls 1996 (oh, being a jazz fan in New York in the ‘90s; the era-defining band that gave us The Next Step and propelled one of the most influential jazz guitarists of the century so far)

2. Miles Davis and John Coltrane, The Final Tour: The Bootleg Series, Vol. 6 (prompted by the awesome Ethan Iverson, I listened to these mindblowing recordings again, paying more attention to what Iverson notes—OMG). And of course, because of this, I’ve been on yet another Coltrane kick, digging A Love Supreme, Ascension, Giant Steps, John Coltrane Plays the Blues, Coltrane with Monk, Coltrane with Cannonball Adderley, and much else.

3. Lester Young with Count Basie, Okeh & Vocalion Sessions, vol. 1-4 and On Savoy. Everyone should listen to Lester Young more than they do. The late Verve recordings are great, but it’s really worth exploring the earlier stuff, which was the most influential. And then you can listen to the last live concerts and cry a bit.

4. I’ve also been digging through this incredible list compiled by Iverson:

   Transitional Technology

   TT 557: The Greatest Jazz Piano Albums of All Time

   The website Everything Jazz recently offered “The 25 Greatest Jazz Piano Albums,” a list that includes several expected classics and a few hot takes…

   Read more

   9 months ago · 509 likes · 206 comments · ETHAN IVERSON

Other

I mostly listen to classical and jazz, though, because of my kids, my Apple Music wrap-up would tell you otherwise. My consumption of punk rock and hardcore has drastically decreased over the last year or so, but I was still excited to play Propagandhi’s latest album, At Peace.

I’m very impressed by the South African guitarist Derek Gripper. Classically trained, he has specialized in transcribing kora music, especially from the Malian music Toumani Diabaté. His album with Ballaké Sissoko is excellent.

I can’t believe Phoebe Bridgers isn't listening to my calls and hasn’t released a new album yet. In the meantime I’ve kept listening to her discography, including her work with boygenius.

Yes, our household is still big on Taylor Swift. We have enjoyed The Life of a Showgirl. Don’t listen to the critics, just listen to the music and have fun.

At the time of writing, I have read 54 books in 2025. Since I tend to be quite picky when choosing books, I rated many of the ones I read this year very highly. Selecting the best ones was impossible, so I decided to simply recommend some of my reading, broken down into thematic categories. So it goes.

Cormac McCarthy

Over the last couple of years, I have virtually completed Cormac McCarthy’s published corpus (twelve novels, two plays, two screenplays, and one nonfiction essay). The bulk of it (twelve books) I read this year, including two I had read about fifteen years ago—The Road and Blood Meridian. I’d still like to read his early short stories and the unproduced screenplay, Whales and Men. And then re-read. I recommend almost everything I read this year, but especially:

• Suttree

• Outer Dark

• The Passenger

• The Sunset Limited

• and of course, Blood Meridian and The Road

Part of my motivation was that, based on just the two novels I had read initially (The Road and Blood Meridian), McCarthy was already among my favorite writers. Then he died in 2023, so I read No Country for Old Men and then the Border Trilogy and was hooked. Last year, I took on a student who wanted to do an independent study on McCarthy. We’re now working on his Bachelor’s Essay (honors thesis). In addition to reading the man himself, I discovered a vast secondary literature and listened to the entire catalog of the wonderful podcast Reading McCarthy, hosted by Scott Yarbrough. I discussed some of my love for McCarthy in a previous post:

War

The big goal of 2025 was Tolstoy’s War and Peace (La guerre et la paix), and while it is indeed very long, it did not disappoint. I read it in French, which makes you forget how much of the dialogue is spoken in French, not Russian, in the novel. My cliché review when I was practically done was:

90% into War and Peace. It is very, very long but also: so sad, so terrifying, so funny, so beautiful, it’s the whole world and all of life, it touches everything that matters: life and death, love and suffering, friendship, music, animals, childhood, ideals and delusion, free will and history. We are so blessed to have it. And it took me 42 years to read it.

Curiously, I didn’t love all of it; some parts felt like a slug, and I set it aside several times for weeks at a time. And yet, it really is one of the greatest books.

Because I’m big on upbeat reads, I decided to read more war novels. These included two other classics, Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms and Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. The former, taking place on the Italian front during the Great War, I found beautiful (even read just after The Sun Also Rises, which is not not about the war), the latter, mixing time travel (or PTSD) and the bombing of Dresden during WWII, is both extremely funny and surprisingly profound. On war, I also read a recently unearthed novel of Céline’s, Guerre, the rawness of which isn’t simply due to the unpolished nature of the manuscript, and makes me want to re-read Voyage au bout de la nuit (Journey to the End of the Night).

While it is not primarily about war, war is certainly central to McCarthy’s magnum opus, Blood Meridian, which I re-read and will read again and again. Also, the Manhattan Project lingers in the background of The Passenger, while The Road assumes a Hobbesian war of all against all.

More Classics

Some of my least favorite books of the year were, accidentally, by women. Thankfully, though, some of the great classics I read were also by women (they don’t have much else in common):

• Flannery O’Connor, A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories

  • Southern Gothic, probably an influence on McCarthy. A lot of Catholic symbolism, much grotesque, some violence, very funny.

• Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

  • Very romantic, but I loved it, in no small part for the time spent in the Alps, including Chamonix

  • Of course, you can’t help but think about AI

• Kate Chopin, The Awakening

  • Not one I was familiar with until recently, although I've heard it’s a standard high school reading. Astute and daring.

• Jane Austen, Persuasion

  • So sharp.

I wrote about the value of reading classics:

Mexico

Partly owing to McCarthy, I’ve become aware of and embarrassed by how little I know about the rich and complicated history and culture across the border. My remediation involved an accessible and opinionated introduction to Mexican philosophy by Carlos Alberto Sánchez, Blooming in the Ruins: How Mexican Philosophy Can Guide Us Toward the Good Life. While it felt a bit too much like public philosophy for my taste, it does a good job covering a range of topics and makes you want to read the Mexican philosophers, which is what matters. (Dr. Sánchez will be visiting us this spring, I’m excited.) I also read the classic (but to me very difficult) Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo (on ’s recommendation), and two short novels by Yuri Herrera, Signs Preceding the End of the World and Season of the Swamp. Signs is probably a little masterpiece, a timely one, albeit dreamy and cryptic, and it warrants re-reading, like Pedro Páramo. I’m very glad I discovered this author, though I wish he wrote longer books.

Nature writing and animals

I’m a sucker for nature writing done well. Because we read excerpts of Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek in my Environmental Ethics class, and she’s been mentioned as an influence on McCarthy, I picked up Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters and started For the Time Being (short but slow reading—it’s about geological timescales, so that’s fine). And because my family was fortunate to spend two weeks in Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks, I enjoyed Tim Cahill’s Lost in My Own Backyard.

On animals specifically, I liked Katherine Rundell’s Vanishing Treasures: A Bestiary of Extraordinary Endangered Creatures (wonderful until the tiny bit of hackneyed moralizing at the end) and Joe Shute’s Stowaway: The Disreputable Exploits of the Rat, which was very helpful for a paper I worked on this year (more on this in the near future).

On the philosophical side, I will also recommend:

• Susana Monsó, Playing Possum: How Animals Understand Death

  • No one else does what Susana does, and she does it well

• Jeff Sebo, The Moral Circle: Who Matters, What Matters, and Why

  • reviewed here by yours truly

  • some further reflections here:

• Dale Jamieson, Ethics and the Environment: An Introduction

  • my favorite philosopher and mentor

  • reviewed here by yours truly

• Peter Godfrey-Smith, Living on Earth: Forests, Corals, Consciousness, and the Making of the World

  • my second favorite philosopher, the last volume of his mind-blowing trilogy after Other Minds and Metazoa. The latter is still my favorite of the three, but I really enjoyed this one, including some sensible reflections on wild animal suffering.

• Mark Rowlands, The Word of Dog: What Our Canine Companions Can Teach Us About Living a Good Life

  • Rowlands’s trade books are criminally underrated. I loved Running with the Pack and The Philosopher and the Wolf. Even though I’m a cat person, this one hit all the right spots and is, like the previous ones, surprisingly profound.

• François Jaquet, Le pire des maux: Éthique et ontologie du spécisme

  • commentary forthcoming by yours truly

Other recommended nonfiction

• Dean Spears and Michael Geruso, After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People

  • extremely compelling case against population decline

• James C. Scott, In Praise of Floods: The Untamed River and the Life It Brings

  • published posthumously; I’m a huge fan of Scott’s, I found this one fascinating and moving, and wish he’d had more time to polish it

• Samuel Scheffler, One Life to Lead: The Mysteries of Time and the Goods of Attachment

  • huge fan of Scheffler’s as well; one of the best living moral philosophers

• Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee, In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us

  • the best treatment I’ve read of the disgrace that was the mainstream pandemic response; glad it’s being well received, the Overton window has opened

• David Reich, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past

• Cameron J. Buckner, From Deep Learning to Rational Machines: What the History of Philosophy Can Teach Us about the Future of Artificial Intelligence

• Ethan Mollick, Co-Intelligence: Living With and Working With AI

• Atul Gawande, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End

***

I also read some middling books that I won’t list, but here are a few I strongly recommend not wasting your time and money on:

• Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All

• Melanie Challenger, How to Be Animal: A New History of What It Means to Be Human

Classics are classics for a reason. They’ve gone through a filter—many filters actually. By the time they’re recommended as classics, the odds that a mistake was made, that the book isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, are practically nil. The older the classic, it seems, the smaller the odds. But classics can get on an accelerated track, where filters are lined up in quick succession, to deliver judgments of quality just about as reliable as they are for the oldies. I just read Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, an egregious omission which I’ve known I should read for years, published in 1969, and it really is that good. It took me a couple of days. In fact it was so good it prompted me to write this post.

While there is no such thing as an instant classic, some masterpieces are recognized as such relatively quickly—personally, I think such was the case, and rightly so, with Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, though his reputation and track record no doubt helped. At the time it was one of the most amazing books I’d read in years. I have set it aside as a treat to re-read soon as part of my McCarthy journey. Classics of the twenty-first century may still be few and far between, so your chances of picking a winner among widely recommended recent books are lower. But you don’t need to go that far back in time to get better odds. The second half of the last century contains plenty of classics, most of which I’ve never read. But anytime you encounter them, you understand immediately.

Still, the most reliable way to get that experience is to pick up an old classic, tested again and again by the filters of history. You may not like it, but you can’t really go wrong. You’ve not made a mistake by reading it; you didn’t waste your time. You just didn’t like it, and that’s okay. With more recent releases, the success ratio is lower, but you may get lucky. It’s a riskier gamble, and you must consider the opportunity costs. I read a lot of recent nonfiction and the occasional contemporary novel. I need it, I want it, it is a great use of my time. However, I am never let down by a classic the way I can be by even the best reviewed books of the last few years, in both fiction and nonfiction. There are too many bad books out there and not enough good filters in place to properly sort the wheat from the chaff. If you’re short on time, you’ll get more value out of time-tested classics. More bang for your buck. (And fewer cliches than in this newsletter.)

Classics can be trusted. But more than that, they reliably put you in touch not just with the past—all artifacts from the past can do so—they also bring you as close to objective value as you can possibly get. Classics realize a kind of non-accidental convergence of judgment. You don’t even need to believe in mind-independent value for this (I don’t); maybe there is no objective value in that sense. But for all intents and purposes, you’re close enough. You can trust the process, as Hume recognized when he argued that convergent judgment over time creates a reliable standard of taste, even without objective beauty. This access to value provided by classics in turn gives us reasons to set up filters, so our descendants can later be grateful we maintained some standards. Each subsequent generation has to perpetuate the selection process to ensure that, at the end of the line, someone can pick up a book being virtually certain it will blow them away. If we don’t, we make our descendants’ access to near-objective value more dicey.

This is true in literature as well as music and all the other arts. (For an interesting perspective on great books in philosophy, see this excellent post by Daniel Greco.) A corollary of my view is that classics can’t really be overrated. The snobbish dismissal of Mozart as too popular, too easy, or too much of the same, is just silly. The people who listen, and there are many of them, know Mozart is one of the all-time greats for a reason. It’s not like the great conductors and performers snubbed Mozart. The only one who did—Glenn Gould—actually recorded Mozart, and it is terrible. You may prefer Bach or Beethoven, and that is fine. But it’s no accident that Mozart always ranks at the top of lists of both the most popular and the best composers of all time—the lists didn’t make him so; their convergence signals that he was. Ironically, some of the people who understood and appreciated Mozart best are those the snobs tend to favor over him—Haydn and Beethoven. The snobs are what Pascal called ‘demi-habiles’ (a high-brow version of the midwit meme).

In the last few years, I’ve started reading classics I never got to during my studies. Having received a classical education, I’ve read many classics, but I’ve always operated at a deficit, starting late, not being an especially voracious, much less fast, reader. As a result, there have been some outrageous omissions I won’t mention. So I began reading classics again in my forties—Dostoevsky, Balzac, Tolstoy, Austen. I read War and Peace this year and just followed up with Shelley’s Frankenstein, Chopin’s The Awakening, and Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. There are so many more yet to tackle. Next year, I’m looking forward to Moby-Dick and Anna Karenina, more Austen, Faulkner, Hemingway, Morrison. And I’d like to actually read the Iliad and the Odyssey, for real, at long last.

It never ends. It’s inexhaustible, it’s incredible, and most of it is available right here, right now, if you can afford to take the time to read. I’m aware of how blessed I am to be able to spend all that time getting so close to objective value. So, on my birthday, I decided to express my gratitude—just a self-indulgent treat.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

There are approximately ten quintillion (10x10¹⁸) insects on Earth, and Jeff Sebo talks about all of them … in just over 180 pages. Moreover, we should care about them (to some degree). And not just insects, but other invertebrates and digital beings, including artificial intelligence (AI) systems, whose numbers are potentially limitless. It’s no longer an expanding but an exploding moral circle …, a cosmic bang.

One of the book’s basic premises is that there are some things we know and many we don’t. We know some basic moral principles. We can also estimate many probabilities, with more or less precision—and how confident we are in our estimates affects how we should approach different cases. Uncertainty, instead of paralyzing us, should force us to adopt a flexible framework to determine who and what counts, in what ways, and to what degree. More fundamentally, it is because we don’t know some things that we know that we should treat certain beings better. The explosion of the moral circle is therefore not so much a reflection of our increased knowledge … but of our increased moral caution.

Another basic premise is that many kinds of nonhumans could have moral status. We cannot presume that humans will always take priority; indeed, Sebo will argue they should not. From this and from particular observations about other entities (including probability estimates of the sentience of, say, flies or worms), we can conclude that a whole range of entities matter, from cats and dogs to cuttlefish and honeybees, from chickens and pigs to androids and AIs. At the very least, all of those might matter. And knowing that they might, it’s well-advised to treat them like they do.

The book is a lot of fun, important, and very accessible. You should read it. In this post I’d like to expand on a brief note I make in the review concerning the metaphor of the moral circle, which has been a mainstay of discussions in environmental ethics and animal ethics for decades.

The moral circle is meant to illustrate the structure of the moral community, the set of entities that matter morally in their own right—all the things we morally ought to take into account in our deliberations. Members of the moral community are said to be “morally considerable,” they warrant moral consideration (of their good, welfare, or interests). Who’s in? At the very least, you and I. Very plausibly, cats and dogs, cows, pigs, and chickens. And if you ask me, probably trouts, lobsters, and bumblebees. If you’re biocentrically inclined, you might all living organisms, not just animals. Environmental ethicists typically think in less individualistic terms. The moral community, for land ethicists and deep ecologists, is fundamentally constituted by ecological relationships and systems, wholes over their parts. Species, ecosystems, landscapes, forests, rivers, and maybe the biosphere make up the moral community; their parts matter too, but only because and in virtue of the intrinsic value of the wholes to which they belong. Whichever way we compose the list, we’re naturally inclined to partition nature between beings that are in, that count, and beings that are not, that don’t (tables and chairs, rocks and stars). But it would be bizarre for the community to be like a square or a triangle. Enter the circle.

I find the metaphor inapt for Sebo’s cosmic vision. Let me explain why and propose a new metaphor.

The Moral Circle is a catchy title, and Sebo made the right call in situating his argument in decades of debate about that very idea. The expanding circle has moved, over time, from family to tribe to nation, from nation to humanity, from humanity to nature and other animals, and now might expand to include digital beings. It’s an ancient idea, with roots in the Stoics’ notion of oikeiosis (concentric circles of affinity) and a long history, well before Peter Singer’s 1981 book, The Expanding Circle. Singer’s thesis is that over the course of human history, people have expanded the circle of beings whose interests matter. Originally, that circle would have been limited to self, family, and tribe, but over time it grew to encompass all other humans and then some animals. That’s a descriptive claim about moral progress, but Singer also argues that this tracks progress in moral reasoning, which implies that the circle ought to expand. We’re on the right track.

But I don’t think the circle metaphor quite captures what Sebo is arguing for. When we talk about moral circles, we implicitly think about a flat, two-dimensional representation of moral consideration. But why should the moral community be flat? After all, we do not live in two-dimensional space. Moreover, Sebo’s circle contains layers, more like an onion than a pancake. But maybe most importantly, it has no fixed center, and so sphere is hardly a better metaphor. Circles and spheres are uniquely defined by their radius and center point. But what are the radius and center point of the moral circle or moral sphere? Indeed, if part of the argument is that the circle not only does but should expand, it implies at least that its radius is not fixed. Neither, I think, is its center. The basic reason is that we don’t live in three-dimensional space either. We live in a spacetime manifold. What is, then, the best metaphor for the 4D moral manifold? I herewith submit: the moral light cone. The image of a light cone captures the fundamental constraint of moral influence: causality.

In physics, a light cone is the set of all spacetime events that can be causally connected to a given event through light signals. It consists of two parts, as illustrated in the image above. The past light cone contains all the spacetime points from which a light signal could have reached the given event. The future light cone contains all the spacetime points that a light signal from the given event could reach. The boundary of the light cone is formed by photons traveling at the speed of light in all directions. In a spacetime diagram, this creates a cone-shaped surface (or two such surfaces for past and future) with the apex at the original event (or present). The light coneoffers us a picture of the causal structure of our influence in spacetime. (There are things outside the light cone, but they are irrelevant for practical purposes. If you want to change the laws of physics and include those in moral consideration, too, go ahead, but you’d better be quick.)

Why is this a better picture? First, it captures the bounded nature of morality, noted a long time ago by Aristotle in book III of Nicomachean Ethics: we can only deliberate about (and subsequently be responsible for) things we can affect through our actions, or which are under our voluntary control or “up to us.” Our moral influence is bounded by the future light cone. Note that, while we may have obligations to aliens in far-flung galaxies or our descendants in a trillion years, Sebo does not argue we have obligations to extinct dinosaurs, for instance.

Second, the light cone keeps expanding over time because light takes time to travel, so the sphere of theoretically possible causal influence grows at exactly the speed of light. Moral influence, like physical influence, is bounded by causal relationships and expands over time.

Now escaping the strict boundaries of physics and indulging in the metaphor, the moral light cone grows as time progresses, we develop a greater capacity for moral consideration and wider spheres of influence as moral progress marches on. The light cone is finite (as the speed of light) but growing. At any moment, our moral influence is bounded but always expanding, unlike a static sphere.

The aptness of the metaphor does not uniquely apply to Sebo’s framework. Any moral circle is better described as a moral light cone simply because we exist in space time. That’s true even if the circle is fixed—even if the moral community is, say, limited to humans or whites or whatever, and even if it does not change. Our moral influence would still be bounded by the causal structure of our light cone and it would still keep expanding, simply because as time progresses, the scope of our influence grows. Our causal influence expands over time regardless of our moral views. Even the most chauvinistic people have growing influence over time; their actions today can affect more people/places than their actions yesterday could. This is the basic geometric expansion of the light cone. Let’s call this natural expansion.

Sebo is making a stronger claim: that what we thought of as a relatively small and fixed circle should instead be radically expanded in light of uncertainty and many more theories of moral status and of what matters are plausible than anthropocentrism. Let’s call this moral expansion. Sebo’s argument suffices to destabilize the circle. If we adopt the light cone metaphor, Sebo’s argument forces us to conclude that our moral influence is of truly cosmic proportions, extending farther in time and space than we ever thought. Sebo’s last chapter is titled, “Think cosmically, act globally.” We, moral agents, constitute the apex of the cone (formerly, center of the circle), and all moral patients are within it. (Technically, each of us occupies a different light cone, but in practice, they will largely overlap.)

We thus have two parallel kinds of expansion, natural and moral. So how far and how fast can this go? First, the moral light cone is not just bounded in spacetime. It should not include everything. There is such a thing as over-inclusion, for instance based on over-attribution of sentience, agency, or another basis of moral status. We should properly calibrate our expansion to avoid both under- and over-inclusion. If only sentient (or even living) beings have moral status, then the moral light cone should not include ashes and dust, even if that’s what were ultimately reduced to and even if we may have moral (and other) reasons to treat certain samples of ash or dust in respectful or dignified ways (we still would not owe it to the ash or the dust). And even if we end up including AIs, we probably should not include a robot vacuum. None of those things have the morally relevant features warranting inclusion on any plausible theory of moral status.

On a descriptive level, what we can include is also bounded by our abilities and psychology. Think of this as variable moral light speeds. The speed of light (‘c’) sets an absolute speed limit in the universe. If there were even such a thing as a moral speed limit, it seems fair to claim that humanity is still driving well under the limit—Singer’s point in The Expanding Circle was not that we should stop; there’s still much progress to be made, especially concerning animals and distant strangers. Your moral car’s speed is bounded not just by the speed limit but by your engine’s capacity. How fast humanity can expand its moral light cone also depends on technology, for new technologies can amplify reach. Modern social networks collapse physical distance and geographical barriers and allow memes to quickly reach millions. AI systems could someday amplify our influence exponentially, by broadcasting tailored messaging to billions. But moral inclusion itself accelerates expansion. We’ve observed this in the animal protection movement, where simply including animals, first limited to, say, companion and working animals, quickly expanded to billions of factory farmed animals. Caring about fish and invertebrate welfare in food production is slowly going mainstream, too. Wild animal welfare, while not mainstream, is also gaining traction. Inclusion breeds inclusivity. And it is compounded by the inclusion of future beings, affected by climate change and various other present choices and policies. And so on, and so forth.

Different actors also have different reach. A policymaker’s influence can contribute to light cone expansion through institutional leverage. Trendsetters and moral entrepreneurs can also have disproportionate impact. In brief, there is no set speed at which moral expansion happens, though there is a moral speed limit, determined by some fundamental constraints such as attentional limits, causality, and cognitive limitations. So, moral circle expansion is not just about what we include, but about how fast our moral influence can propagate through different media of the moral universe. And for that reason too, I find the moral light cone metaphor more apt.

But I’m exaggerating. Contrary to prejudice, bats are not blind, with eyesight often better than humans in low-light conditions like dawn and dusk. The quality of their vision varies among species: fruit bats have particularly sharp eyesight and large eyes, while smaller insectivorous bats have functional but less acute vision. Echolocation complements rather than replaces vision: vision for general navigation and long-range orientation, echolocation for precision tasks like catching insects. Some species can even see ultraviolet light. Using both systems together are nonetheless able to perceive the world very differently than we, or most other mammals, do—that’s setting aside the fact that many mammals tend to rely on auditory or olfactory perception more than vision.

One of the most stupendous facts I have learned in recent years was brought to my attention by one of my favorite philosophers, Peter Godfrey-Smith, in a Twitter thread a couple of years ago. Peter’s comments were based on a recent study of the global biomass of wild mammals in PNAS.1 Peter then included some of the analysis on his latest book, Living on Earth, the last of his marvelous trilogy after Other Minds and Metazoa. According to the study, approximately 7% of this biomass (0.5 million metric tons) is constituted by bats. Not very impressive, but bats are, like rodents, comparatively small and light among mammals. Bats weigh between 2g (Kitti’s hog-nosed bat) and 1.6kg (Indian flying fox and Great flying fox). Bats “comprise one-fifth of species and two-thirds in terms of individual mammals”, as shown in this figure:

That’s right. By a sizeable margin, most individual wild mammals are bats. Admittedly, birds outnumber bats by a factor of 5; fish by a factor of 300 (!).2 Still, numbers-wise, your typical mammal is a bat. The world of mammals is primarily peopled by small rodents and bats.

Well, not quite. Wild mammals make up just four percent of the global biomass of mammals on Earth. 62% are livestock and 34% are humans [sources: 1; 2]. Humans and livestock are comparatively large, so this comparison tells us little about the number of individuals. It’s not easy to come by with precise estimates. But estimated “livestock counts”, there are between 4 and 5 billion farmed mammals alive on earth at any given time (higher than the number of animals killed per year, since most of those live more than a year; the reverse is true of chickens3).4

Alright, much of the mammal world at any given time is seen by cows, pigs, goats, sheep, and human beings. But let’s get into the woods and wait for the sun to set, and forget these highly localized and clustered populations of human and nonhuman domesticated animals. Then, most of the world’s mammals are bats. And as we saw, they see but also echolocate. And so, outside of farms, where most mammals live, and urban and suburban areas, where most humans live, darkness is being echolocated. This means that most mammalian experience is either highly constrained (livestock) or radically alien to us (bats). For we have no idea what it’s like to be a bat, at least so argued the philosopher Thomas Nagel in a famous paper.5

In 1974, in “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”, Nagel attempted a refutation of physicalism, the view that everything, including the mind and consciousness, is physical, though that’s not what concerns us here. What interests us is that part of his argument relied on claims about the irreducibly subjective and, as a result, potentially alien nature of experience. Nagel assumed that bats, like all mammals, “have experience.” Experience, here, corresponds roughly to what philosophers call “phenomenal consciousness”, states that there is something it is like to be in. I take it to be roughly synonymous with sentience, too. Nagel wrote,

[T]he essence of the belief that bats have experience is that there is something it is like to be a bat. Now we know that most bats (the microchiroptera, to be precise) perceive the external world primarily by sonar, or echolocation, detecting the reflections, from objects within range, of their own rapid, subtly modulated, high frequency shrieks. Their brains are designed to correlate the outgoing impulses with the subsequent echoes, and the information thus acquired enables bats to make precise discriminations of distance, size, shape, motion, and texture comparable to those we make by vision. But bat sonar, though clearly a form of perception, is not similar in its operation to any sense that we possess, and there is no reason to suppose that it is subjectively like anything we can experience or imagine. This appears to create difficulties for the notion of what it is like to be a bat.

The bats, like all conscious creatures, “embody a particular point of view.” Their experience is only accessible from their point of view, Nagel thinks. And so it is inaccessible to us. We can’t know what it’s like to be a bat. If we could, we’d be bats, and so we wouldn’t be humans imagining what it’s like to be bats. So, to be more precise, we could know what bat consciousness is like, but only by adopting the bat’s first-person point of view, which we can’t. From the objective, or third-person, standpoint in general (and of physicalism in particular), we are missing the essential dimension of subjectivity. The problem generalizes beyond bats to all forms of subjective experience. We can similarly ask what it’s like to be a crow, an octopus, a hermit crab, or a bumblebee and find ourselves equally stumped. For that matter, human experience, if it is irreducibly subjective, as Nagel argues, is likewise inaccessible to the objective point of view. The roadblock is the same (language and shared experience definitely help in the case of humans).6

I don’t know if Nagel was right, as much as I admire his work and enjoy teaching this paper. But even if there was nothing intrinsically mysterious about bat consciousness, the fact remains: they go through the world very much unlike ourselves, despite sharing the same basic mammalian hardware. We have so much to learn from bats. And yet nobody knows what it’s like to be them. We have no idea what much of the world looks like. Isn’t that wonderful?

What’s a fugue?

a contrapuntal, polyphonic compositional technique in two or more voices, built on a subject (a musical theme) that is introduced at the beginning in imitation (repetition at different pitches), which recurs frequently throughout the course of the composition. (Wikipedia)

A fugue typically comprises three sections: an exposition, where the subjects are introduced, a development, where they are expanded, inverted, stacked, and twisted around, and a recapitulation (a return to the subject in the tonic key).

It’s a type of contrapuntal composition, specifically a kind of imitative counterpoint (which involves the repetition of an idea across vocal parts). The technique of counterpoint combines multiple melodic lines (or voices), a species of polyphony, the mere parallel occurrence of multiple voices. Counterpoint is the systematic art of combining independent thematic lines in a successfully unified tapestry of sound, and the fugue is its most complex and rule-governed form. The systematized art of counterpoint emerged from medieval polyphony during the Renaissance (Palestrina, Byrd, Josquin des Prez, Frescobaldi) and culminated during the Baroque era with Buxtehude, Handel, and Bach.

We hear fugues differently than they did in the Baroque era.1 Music was essentially polyphonic before the Baroque era, and even largely so until the classical era (Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven), when it became more homophonic and organized around the articulation of melody with harmony. Contrapuntal music focuses on how different voices interact both vertically (harmonically) and horizontally (melodically). But classical-era music uses harmony in novel ways to create polyphony. And as we’ll see, Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and others were very capable of writing fugues—in no small part something they learned from Handel and Bach. The main difference between truly contrapuntal music and classical harmonic music is the true independence and equality of the melodic lines in the former but not in the latter, where harmonies, typically chords, are there to support or accompany the melodic line, even if they can also be used to create dissonance or tension. Lines can also be rhythmically independent in counterpoint (part of what makes composing fugues technically challenging). Still, while classical harmony somewhat simplifies contrapuntal technique, it also integrates it.

In fugues, we have multiple independent voices, one voice introducing a theme or “subject” which is then imitated by the other voices entering in turn while the original subject is being developed. There can be multiple subjects as well, but even with one subject, fugues can become quite complex depending on how many voices they feature, typically two to four, but sometimes up to six. Each voice enters staggered, so the melodic lines do not unfold in unison. It can be difficult to keep track of the development of the main subject and the entrance of the answering voices at the same time. The different voices are often in different albeit related keys (e.g., tonic vs. dominant). During development, the subject can also shift to new keys and be inverted, stacked, or combined with new material. It can get pretty sophisticated, or unwieldy, and it thus takes a great master to make it sound aline rather than academic.

To me, the best fugues will give the listener a sense of ineluctability, as if there were no other way for the music to go. I like fast fugues better, but slower ones can be equally powerful. Despite the strict rules and very intentional crafting governing composition, fugues are often paired with a fantasia or a prelude, which have an improvisational character. In suites, orchestral, and choral works, they are often used at climactic points. A fugue can sound as natural as the structure of the world, a musical architecture expressing the pure essence of reality in eternity. Schopenhauer wrote in The World as Will and Representation that music is a “universal language” and “a copy of the whole will as the world itself”.

As I noted, Classical composers never abandoned the fugue. It continued its development in more subtle forms with the Romantics and even into the 20th century. I cannot really explain what makes them so satisfying. Instead, let me offer you a playlist of my favorite fugues and some discoveries I made researching this piece. In my next post, I will share some more surprises. For each, I recommend excellent recordings, but there are many more. Streaming platforms make discovery easy.

Without further ado, here are a few of my favorite fugues.

A playlist

Johann Sebastian Bach

Fantasia and Fugue in G minor, “The Great”, BWV 542

• Instrument: Keyboard (organ)

• Date: c. 1720

• Structure: 4-voice fugue with double subject

• Significance and character: one of Bach’s greatest organ fugues

• Recommended Recording: Karl Richter (organ) (Deutsche Grammophon), Werner Jacob (organ) (Warner), Benjamin Alard (organ) (Harmonia Mundi), Francesco Piemontesi (piano) (Avanti), Stepan Simonian (Deutsche Grammophon)

Prelude and Fugue in A minor, BWV 543

• Keyboard (organ)

• 1708-1717

• 4-voice fugue

• It is not uncommon to find the G minor and A minor together on recordings. This one also displays relentless energy and a thrilling finish.

• Karl Richter (organ) (Deutsche Grammophon), Werner Jacob (organ) (Warner), Benjamin Alard (organ) (Harmonia Mundi), Lise de la Salle (naïve)

• 542 and 543 have excellent piano transcriptions by Franz Liszt

Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor, BWV 582

• Keyboard (organ). I’ve heard remarkable transcriptions and arrangements for accordion, two pianos, and ensembles.

• 1706-1713

• 4-voice fugue following the passacaglia theme (continuous variations over a short, repeated bass line in triple meter)

• To me, simply one of Bach’s most impressive organ works. The passacaglia builds up to a dramatic conclusion, but we’re only halfway through—then the fugue starts and, in good performances, all hell breaks loose.

• Werner Jacob (organ) (Warner), Ton Koopman (organ) (Archiv). Just look for transcriptions for orchestra (Stokowski, Respighi), piano (Reger), and all sorts of string, brass, or multi-instrument ensembles. You can’t really go wrong with this one. Just make sure it’s not played too softly.

Toccata and Fugue in C minor, BWV 911

• Harpsichord, piano

• 1707-1713

• My favorite toccata, simply owing to the fugue, whose catchy, heady theme seems like the perfect excuse to have a lot of fun. Not the grandiose, mature Bach but a lot of wonderful youthful energy. It also shows Bach adapting organ techniques to the harpsichord.

• Christophe Rousset (harpsichord) (Talens Lyriques), Glenn Gould (piano) (Sony), Martha Argerich (piano) (Deutsche Grammophon)

The Art of Fugue (Die Kunst der Fuge), BWV 1080

• Unspecified instrumentation, usually keyboard, but as pure music, it lends itself to many different instrumentations.

• 1740s-1750 (unfinished at his death)

• 14 fugues and 4 canons. Increasingly complex variations on the same subject. A wide-ranging and unfortunately incomplete exploration of the space of contrapuntal possibilities. Contrapunctus 9 alla duo Decima is a favorite (and was the opening track to Kieran Setiya’s Five Questions podcast), but the entire cycle is a treasure trove.

• Abstract and intellectual, at times dry, Bach’s final statement and summation of contrapuntal techniques

• Christophe Rousset (harpsichord) (Aparté), Daniil Trifonov (piano) (Deutsche Grammophon), Glenn Gould (piano/organ), Emerson String Quartet (Deutsche Grammophon), Phantasm (viol ensemble) (Linn)

The Musical Offering, BWV 1079 - Ricercar a 6

• Chamber music cycle, played with different instrumentations

• 1747

• 6-voice fugue on Frederick the Great’s “Royal Theme”

• The whole offering is music like no other, transforming a dry little theme into music of sublime depth and complexity, one of Bach’s late summative achievements with The Art of the Fugue and the Mass in B minor.

• Masaaki Suzuki and Bach Collegium Japan (BIS). Please do check out Anton Webern’s magnificent transcription for orchestra. Here’s Paavo Järvi with the Berlin Philharmonic.

Mass in B minor, BWV 232

• Choral work

  • Conclusion of the Gloria: Cum sancto spiritu (five-part fugue)

  • Credo: Confiteor (five-part double fugue)

  • Kyrie I also includes extended fugal sections

• 1724-1749 (assembled over many years)

• Magisterial choral fugues with orchestral accompaniment. Bach’s ultimate musical statement

• Masaaki Suzuki and Bach Collegium Japan (BIS), Raphaël Pichon and Pygmalion (Harmonia Mundi)

Well-Tempered Clavier Books I & II, BWV 846-893

• Keyboard (if you ask me, works best on the piano, as if Bach had foreseen what it would have sounded like)

• 1722, c. 1740

• 48 preludes and fugues featuring all major and minor keys organized chromatically

• Incredible variety in character. While Bach may have composed it as a book of exercises or experiments, it has become a bible for pianists and has been adapted into endless forms by composers across all genres from classical to jazz to pop, rock, and electronic.

• I can’t choose a specific fugue that I like best, but here are some highlights: Book I, Fugues in C-sharp minor and in E-flat minor; Book II, Fugue in B minor.

• It still has sentimental value to me, and while not all interpretations speak to me the way they used to, I still cherish it: Glenn Gould (Sony). Sviatoslav Richter (alto) is also great.

Bonus

Like much of Bach’s work that was composed for organ or harpsichord, these pieces are suitable with all sorts of keyboards and ensemble arrangements.

• “Little” Fugue in G Minor, BWV 578, one of Bach’s best-known fugues. Lots of fun, and only “little” in contrast with “the great.”

• Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue in D minor, BWV 903

• Prelude and fugue in A minor, BWV 895

• Prelude and Fughetta in E minor, BWV 900

• Prelude and Fughetta in G major, BWV 902

• The opening sinfonia of the keyboard Partita No. 2 in C minor, BWV 826, ends with a remarkable fugal section

• Sonata for Violin solo, No. 1 in G minor, BWV 1001, II: Fuga

Oh, I don’t know if you’ve heard this one…

• Toccata and Fugue in D minor, BWV 565

  • the later, very famous one

  • original for the organ, Busoni transcription for piano, or accordion

Franz Joseph Haydn

Symphony No. 70 in D major, Hob. 1/70, IV: Finale

• 1779

• triple two-part fugue in D minor ending in D major

Two oratorios, one sacred, the other secular, both wonderful

• The Creation, Hob. XXI.2, Part 1, No. 10: Fugue, “Denn et hat Himmel” (1797-8)

• The Seasons, Hob. XXI.3, Spring, No. 6, “Uns spriessest Überfluss” (1801)

String quartets, Op. 20

• 1772

• Three of the six quartets end with a fugue:

  • String quartet in C major, Op. 20, No. 4, IV: Fuga a quatro Sogetti

  • String quartet in F minor, Op. 20, No. 5, IV: Fuga a due Sogetti

  • String quartet in A major, Op. 20, No. 6, IV: Fuga a tre Sogetti

• Haydn formalized the classical string quartet and was a major influence on Mozart and later Beethoven. Here, he used fugal finales to depart from the more traditional galant style and lean into the Sturm und Drang

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Like many things, Mozart learned to write fugues fairly young, as an academic rite of passage. He was able to improvise fugues as well. The imposed framework didn’t always lead to the most inspired results. Technical prowess was not necessarily what drove him. This didn’t prevent him from composing some stunning fugues, including what is to me one of the greatest pieces of music ever written. And we sometimes forget that Mozart learned directly from one of Bach’s sons, Johann Christian, and indirectly from Handel and Bach himself. He carefully studied their scores, was fascinated by contrapuntal technique (which, I think, transpires not just in his choral work but in his piano concertos), and he transcribed some preludes and fugues from the Well-Tempered Clavier for string trio and quartet.

Fantasia and Fugue No. 1 in C major, K. 394

• Solo piano

• 1782

• Mozart wrote this relatively unknown piece on his wife Constanze’s request, who implored him to write a fugue in the baroque style. Mozart was grappling with the imposing figures of polyphony, Bach and Handel, and wanted to try his hand at this (he came to terms with their legacy in many other ways, including his sacred works such as the Great Mass in C minor, K. 427 or the criminally underrated, if ‘old-style’, Vesperae solennes de confessore, K. 339).

• The prelude is somewhat unconventional, and the fugue occasionally mechanical, but it’s dazzling and at times intensely dramatic.

Adagio and Fugue in C minor, K. 546

• String quartet/orchestra

• 1788

• Mozart entered it into his own catalogue as “A short Adagio for two violins, viola and bass, for a fugue which I wrote some time ago for two Pianos” (Ferguson/Wikipedia). The fugue is based on the two-piano version, also in C minor, K. 426, written in 1783.

• Mozart wrote relatively rarely in minor keys. His writing in both C minor and G minor is dark, dramatic, and sometimes tragic; it often features chromaticism and foreshadows Romanticism. Mozart may not have been introspective and lyrical like the Romantics perceived him; he often wrote the most joyous music in difficult times or to express sorrow and the most tragic music in easy times. This piece is no exception. It sounds tragic, but that may well be it: sound.

• Yo-Yo Ma, Kim Kashkashian, Daniel Phillips, & Gidon Kremer (CBS/Sony), Itzhak Perlman with Berlin Philharmonic (Warner), András Schiff and Peter Serkin (ECM) for the two-piano version of the fugue K. 426, or Ton Koopman and Tini Mathot on the harpsichord (Challenge Classics)

Requiem in D minor, K. 621 - “Kyrie Eleison”

• Sacred choral work (second movement)

• 1791 (Mozart’s final year)

• Double fugue with two contrasting subjects - “Kyrie eleison” and “Christe eleison”. A poignant if terrifying plea for mercy, tension building throughout.

• Bracketing the complicated history of Franz Xaver Süssmayr’s completion of the manuscript, this is Mozart at his peak, incorporating what he learned from the greats in his own voice(s), displaying the essential features of a fugue: independence and unity.

• John Eliot Gardiner with Monteverdi Choir (Archiv), Herbert von Karajan with Berlin Philharmonic (DG)

Symphony No. 41 in C major, K. 551 (“Jupiter”)

• Final movement

• 1788

• This is the pinnacle of classical symphonic writing. As such, Mozart was not writing fugues as movements. Rather, what we have here is a classical sonata form movement with fugal development, based on the simple “Jupiter” motif (C-D-F-E). In the development section, Mozart takes multiple themes, twists them around, and stacks them upon each other for the rest of the movement with dazzling virtuosity. We reach peak insanity in the coda, where Mozart combines all five themes simultaneously (a massive “stretto”) in a climactic finale.2

• Olympian, triumphant, euphoric, the pinnacle of Classical composition, the ultimate synthesis of contrapuntal technique and galant style, Mozart shows the world and eternity, “look what I can do, look what we, over centuries refining this art, have achieved”. This remains one of my very favorite pieces of music ever written. I want to listen to it just before I die.

• Leonard Bernstein with Vienna Philharmonic (Deutsche Grammophon), Sir Charles Mackerras with Scottish Chamber Orchestra (Linn)

Ludwig van Beethoven

If Bach’s fugues are like cathedrals building themselves, Beethoven’s are like intricate fireworks. The irony is that one of the most famous discussions of Beethoven’s fugues concerned his inferior skills in Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus.

Mann worked closely with Adorno while writing his novel. The ideas expressed by musicologist Wendell Kretzschmar and his pupil, the budding composer Adrian Leverkühn (who, like Schoenberg, invents, in the novel, a twelve-tone system) reflect Adorno’s own. In fascinating, if at times infuriating, passages, the men lament the homophony of Classical era composition, nostalgic about Renaissance polyphony. Beethoven does not evade their criticisms. His forceful treatment of the form, obsessive rhythmic writing, and his capitulation to harmony, to them, betray a profound misunderstanding of the polyphonic ideal that ruled from the Renaissance to Bach.

Like much of Adorno’s writing about music (he railed against Sibelius and hated jazz, for instance), I’m not sure the Kretzschmar-Leverkühn take has aged well. If anything, it is a sign of its time and echoes Schoenberg’s impatience with tonal music and attempt to reclaim Bach’s polyphony—all of them integrated elements from Bach or transcribed some of his works. But the take misunderstands what Beethoven was doing. The Hammerklavier fugue, the Grosse Fuge, and the Missa Solemnis break from the norms and traditions of his time. They are no longer purely classical, nor are they emulations of Bach-style counterpoint. They are Beethoven at his peak, reinventing what a fugue can be. Even before then, the Eroica finale, far from a botched attempt, shows Beethoven’s mastery of the technique. Granted, Beethoven’s fugues are not pure expressions of the structure of the world like Bach’s counterpoint; they carry dramatic meaning and a narrative sense of development alien even to Mozart or Haydn. But the space of possibilities is large, and larger still since Beethoven’s expansion. It is in this spirit of innovation that we should approach Beethoven’s fugues.

Symphony No. 3 in E-flat major, Op. 55 (“Eroica”)

• Final movement

• 1803-1804

• Fugal development section

• Heroic and transformative, a revolution in music

• Claudio Abbado and Vienna Philharmonic (Deutsche Grammophon), Leonard Bernstein and New York Philharmonic (Sony)

Piano Sonata No. 29 in B-flat major, Op. 106 (“Hammerklavier”)

• Final movement

• 1817-1818

• Massive 3-voice fugue, one of Beethoven’s foremost achievements on the keyboard, unforgiving and visibly demanding for all performers. If you thought fugues were an antiquated, academic form, you haven’t listened to Beethoven. Beethoven wields technique like no other to dramatic effect like no other, pushing forms to their breaking point like no other. This might simply be one of the greatest fugues ever written, including Bach.

• Maurizio Pollini (Deutsche Grammophon), Marc-André Hamelin (Hypérion)

Piano Sonata No. 31 in A-flat major, Op. 110

• Final movement

• 1821-1822

• Arioso dolente alternating with fugue, culminating in inverted fugue subject

• Profound, transcendent, running the gamut of human emotions

• Extremely modern, Beethoven’s waving goodbye to classical forms. To me, it sounds like Beethoven is giving us incomprehensible but sublime material, telling us, “deal with it”, as he did with his late quartets

• Maurizio Pollini (Deutsche Grammophon)

Piano Variations and Fugue in E-flat major, Op. 35 (“Eroica variations”)

• 1802, composed one year before the Symphony No. 3 Eroica, the finale of which features other variations on the opening bass line section

• The last movement, the fugue, is a splendid conclusion and foreshadows Beethoven’s late style, exemplified in the sonatas Nos. 29 and 31.

• Demonstrates his early mastery of combining variation technique with contrapuntal development, paving the way for the Eroica Symphony’s finale

• Rudolf Serkin (Sony), Alfred Brendel (Philips)

Piano Variations on a Waltz by Diabelli, Op. 120

• 1819-1823

• The penultimate variation, No. 32, is another stormy and massive fugue, the climax of the piece, which transitions into a quiet and tender concluding minuet, reminiscent in its quiet character of the variations in the last movement of his last piano sonata, Op. 111 as well as of Bach’s aria concluding the Goldberg Variations. Variation 32 is not the only fugue; variation 24 is a (relatively gentle) fughetta. But variation 32 is a monumental triple fugue driven by a palpable dramatic urge. Beethoven, again, shows off his total mastery of fugal writing.

• Alfred Brendel (Philips) or Maurizio Pollini (DG)

Missa Solemnis in D major, Op. 123

• Several fugal sections, but especially the closing fugue of the Credo on “Et vitam venturi saeculi”, which, according to Wikipedia, “includes one of the most difficult passages in the choral repertoire, when the subject returns at doubled tempo for a stirring conclusion.”

• 1819-1823

• The Missa Solemnis is one of Beethoven’s crowning achievements in his late period. Beethoven’s choral works are uneven, but Beethoven kept some of his most complex writing (and perhaps his more spiritual late years) for this one.

• Leonard Bernstein with New York Philharmonic and Westminster Choir (Sony), Otto Klemperer with New York Philharmonia and Chorus (Warner)

• Note that the Missa Solemnis, the A-flat major sonata, and the Diabelli variations were composed around the same time.

Grosse Fuge in B-flat major, Op. 133

• String quartet (originally the finale of Op. 130, later published separately)

• 1825-1826

• Massive, incredibly complex double fugue. Characteristic of Beethoven’s late style in its forward-looking originality, complexity, and sublime intensity, uncharacteristically lacking in tenderness and Apollinian beauty despite some lyrical moments. This is not really one of my favorite fugues, but it is nonetheless monumental and significant.

• One of Beethoven’s most radical and prophetic works, initially thought to be an unplayable monstrosity. Allegedly very challenging to play, and yet a modernist masterpiece of the chamber music repertoire.3

• Alban Berg Quartet (EMI), Danish String Quartet (ECM)

Cello Sonata No. 5 in D major, Op. 102, No. 2, III: Allegro - Allegro fugato

• For cello and piano

• 1815

• Concluding fugue, characteristic of the daring exploratory style of Beethoven’s “late” period

• Yo-Yo Ma [c] and Emmanuel Ax [p] (Sony), Mischa Maisky [c] and Martha Argerich [p] (DG)

Other nice fugues for string quartet

• No. 9, Op. 59, No. 3, in C major, Finale

• No. 14, Op. 131, in C-sharp minor, opens with a contemplative fugue

Felix Mendelssohn

Mendelssohn is one of my favorite composers and, in my opinion, still underrated. He was instrumental in the Bach revival among Romantics. Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion had basically been forgotten until Mendelssohn rediscovered it. Bach’s influence is palpable throughout his work, some of which can be seen as derivative études or exercises infused with Romanticism. But some of it is genuine, original contrapuntal writing.

Six Preludes and Fugues, Op. 35

• Piano cycle

• 1836-1837

• I especially like Fugues No. 1 in E minor and No. 3 in B minor

• Michael Brown, piano (First Hand Records)

Organ Sonata No. 6 in D minor, Op. 65, II. Fugue

• 1845

• A masterful late Romantic organ fugue, combining the structural clarity of Baroque counterpoint with Romantic harmonic depth and lyricism.

• Peter Hurford (Decca)

• Also see Prelude and Fugue in C minor, Op. 37, No. 1

String Octet in E-flat major, Op. 20 - IV. Presto

• 1825 (Mendelssohn was only 16!)

• Not a proper fugue but a fugal finale where the motif is bounced off the eight instruments

• The octet is one of the most joyful pieces of classical music, a true masterpiece by a teenage prodigy (Mendelssohn wrote better music at 16 than Mozart did at the same age)

• Emerson String Quartet enhanced with members of various quartets (Deutsche Grammophon)

Four Pieces for String, Op. 81, No. 4: Fugue in E-flat major

• String quartet

• 1827, published posthumously as “Op. 81”

• Charming, sorrowful, and tender. Mozartian

Johannes Brahms

Brahms is one of my favorite composers. He was the best at innovating within traditional forms.

Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel, Op. 24

• Piano

• 1861

• Increasingly innovative variations on a charming but simple tune. Sweeping architecture, pure music rivaling Beethoven’s greatest variations for virtuosic piano writing.

• Murray Perahia (Sony), Emmanuel Ax (Sony)

Ein deutsches Requiem, nach Worten der heiligen Schrift (A German Requiem, to Words of the Holy Scriptures), Op. 45

• Choral work

• 1865-1868

• Multiple fugues throughout (e.g., climax of the second, third, and sixth movements)

• Classical in structure. Pastoral and peaceful. Intricate contrapuntal texture.

• What are these fugues expressions of?

  • “temporal expressions of eternity but also of the completion of creation and experience” (John Hencken, LA Philharmonic)

  • “a symbol of eternal life with the transformation of the text, the key, and the texture” (Ryo Hasegawa)

• Otto Klemperer with Philharmonia Chorus and Orchestra (Warner), John Eliot Gardiner with Monteverdi Choir and Orchestre révolutionnaire et romantique (Philips)

Cello Sonata No. 1, Op. 38

• Fugal finale

• 1865

• Very Brahmsian: intimate, autumnal yet full of driving force. Excellent example of Romantic era fugal development, combining technical form with emotional expression.

• Yo-Yo Ma [c] and Emanuel Ax [p] (Sony), Alisa Weilerstein [c] and Inon Barnatan [p] (Pentatone)

Misc

Dieterich Buxtehude, Praeludium und Fuge, E minor, BuxWV 142

• Organ

• North German Baroque, one of the early masters of the genre, a major inspiration for Bach. Often improvisatory, shifting from fantasy to strict counterpoint

Domenico Scarlatti, Sonata in D minor, K. 417

• Harpsichord

• Scarlatti wrote 555 solo keyboard sonatas, most of them no longer than a few minutes but nonetheless delightful. This is one of his few actual fugues.

George Frideric Handel, Keyboard Suite in E minor, HWV 429, I: Fuga

• Harpsichord, piano

• 1738

• Opening movement of the suite. I am not well-versed in Handel’s work, but his keyboard suites are very nice and are enjoying an apparent revival with many fine recent recordings. They work very well on the piano, but of course, terrific on the harpsichord.

• Pierre Hantaï (harpsichord) (Mirare), Francesco Corti (harpsichord) (Arcana), Daria van den Bercken (piano, does not include the E minor suite) (Sony)

Clara Schumann, Three Preludes and Fugues for piano, Op. 16

• 1847

• Skillful study in counterpoint infused with a Romantic sensibility

• Clara composed in the shadows of her husband, Robert, and her friend (and Platonic lover) Brahms, but was one of the most accomplished and acclaimed pianists of her time, one of the first to perform without scores.

• Suzanne Grützmann (Profil)

Franz Liszt, Piano Sonata in B minor, S. 178, III: Allegro energico

• 1853

• Liszt’s massive single movement sonata (his only one), terrifying, enigmatic. Liszt, as in much of his transcriptions and original piano works, pays homage to the great masters

• Martha Argerich (DG), Emil Gilels (RC3), Igor Levit (Sony), Yuja Wang (DG)

Gustav Mahler, Symphonies No. 5 in C-sharp minor and No. 8 in E-flat major

• Fugues were considered old-fashioned at the time. Still, some doubted that Mahler had the chops to write one. He clearly proved them wrong. Mahler’s music is exquisitely and dauntingly complex, imposing, and deeply spiritual; it can be overwhelming, and it took me years to warm up to it. Allow me not to comment much on it and simply refer you to two instances. Both are impressive examples of modern symphonic writing incorporating fugues in large-scale forms.

• Multiple fugal sections in the rondo finale of Symphony No. 5 (1902)

• Large double fugue in Part 1 of Symphony No. 8 (1906)

At the premiere of the Eighth Symphony, listeners were overwhelmed by the climax of part I. The heroic key of E-flat major and march-like rhythm with the choruses singing together fire one’s senses. Then, as love pours into one’s heart, the choruses break into a spectacle of intricate exchanges (a double fugue):

Accende lumen sensibus [Our senses with thy light inflame]
Infunde amorem cordibus [our hearts to heavenly love reclaim]
(trans. Robert Bridges) (Boston Symphony Orchestra)

• Lots of great recordings by Leonard Berstein, Claudio Abbado, Gustavo Dudamel, Simon Rattle, and many others

Federico Busoni, Fantasia contrappuntistica, BV 256

• 1910

• Several versions exist for solo piano and one for two pianos, as well as arrangements for organ or orchestra

• The piece is a homage to Bach’s Die Kunst der Fuge. Busoni transcribed a lot of other composers’ work, but especially Bach. His piano works are infamously difficult.

• Igor Levit (Sony). For other Busoni works, I recommend Marc-André Hamelin

Amy Beach, Prelude and Fugue for piano, Op. 81

• 1917

• An American composer and pianist I only recently discovered

• Late Romantic style, here reminiscent of Liszt but standing on its own. I like her chamber music a lot

• Martina Frezzotti (Brilliant Classics)

Edward Elgar, Fantasie and Fugue in C minor, Op. 86 (after Bach, BWV 537)

• Orchestral arrangement (from organ)

• 1922

• You may know Elgar from the Enigma Variations, his Cello concerto (especially if you’ve seen the movie Tar), or his Pomp and Circumstances Marches (if you’ve ever attended a graduation). His work is still relatively underrated. I didn’t know this arrangement until recently, and it’s lovely.

Maurice Ravel, Le Tombeau de Couperin, II: Fugue

• Suite for solo piano (the fugue does not appear in the orchestral version)

• 1914-1917

• Another homage, a memorial (“tombeau”), to a great, in the neoclassical/modernist style.

• Slow, beautiful fugue

• Anne Queffelec (Erato), Bertrand Chamayou (Erato), Alexandre Tharaud (Harmonia Mundi), Philippe Thuriot (accordion) (Warner)

Dmitri Shostakovich: 24 Preludes and Fugues, Op. 87

• Piano cycle

• 1950-1951

• A 20th-century response to Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier. Unlike in Bach’s chromatic/tempered progression, the pieces proceed in relative major/minor pairs around the circle of fifths.

• I’ll be honest: I have not often listened to the cycle. But almost every time I have listened to Shostakovich, the string quartets, the symphonies, or the piano works, I have ranked it among my favorite 20th-century “classical” music.

• The whole cycle has a neo-classical vibe, as fascinating as the composer’s life and character, and is filled with raw emotions and formal experimentation.

• Igor Levit (Sony), Keith Jarrett (ECM)

Next time: some contrapuntal surprises. Stay tuned!

I love this book and have used its first edition to teach environmental ethics for years. The second edition is true to the original, but some parts have been thoroughly updated, including expanded chapters (previously sections) on animal agriculture and on wildlife conflicts in California. You can use the book as a textbook, but it’s also an excellent introduction to the topic in its own right and, frankly, just a very good piece of environmental philosophy, where Jamieson’s deep interest in conflicts and plurality shines through. My favorite aspect of the book is its nuanced and lucid engagement with metaethics, an infamous minefield for environmental ethicists willing to motivate intrinsic concern for nature.

An excerpt from my review:

Jamieson’s metaethical view is that “valuing is contextual, object-directed, and constrained by biology, psychology, and history” (58). The whole chapter is guided by a patient analysis of various statements such as “It is wrong to kill animals for food,” “Mountain gorillas are vegetarian” (vs. “Mountain gorillas are valuable”) and includes a sophisticated yet perfectly accessible discussion of realism, subjectivism, naturalism, and intrinsic value. Realism would have seemed the default position in the 1970s when a minority of philosophers were trying to establish that nature has value in its own right. Through a careful analysis of the practical functions of moral language, Jamieson eschews the default position and confronts “The fundamental challenge of metaethics”: “to provide an account that can explain [the] strange set of features that seems to characterize moral language”, features of both “fact-stating discourse” and “expressions of attitudes” (56). Jamieson’s solution lies in understanding valuing itself:

Valuing is a transaction between valuers and the world that implies both a subject and an object. . . .Once we see subjects and objects as essential to this valuing, then the fact that both subjects and objects constrain valuing comes into view. (56)

This deceptively simple view drives Jamieson’s approach to a wide range of issues and succeeds, in my view, in capturing the essential motivation of environmental concern without controversial metaphysical assumptions. Intrinsic value just is the result of a contextual process, constrained by reasons, of valuing certain things (people, animals, objects, places, and processes). Thus, we can “reconcile the object-relatedness of realism with the motivational insight of subjectivism.” (58) We end up with an attractive package. A non-realist moral pluralism that treats many kinds of nonhuman entities and processes as valuable non-instrumentally. The package is capacious enough to account for our duties to (or the intrinsic consideration of) rivers and desert ecosystems, goats and wildflowers, gorillas and chickens, while leaving enough wiggle room for tensions and conflicts to emerge, leaving the handling of those conflicts up to the very source of value and reasons: the imperfectly rational, meaning-seeking, cooperative creatures that we are.

This last part is important. Much of Jamieson’s recent work can be read as an attempt to salvage our ability to live meaningful lives in the Anthropocene, in light of the facts that most of us can hardly make any difference through our individual actions and that many of the things we care about are going to disappear or change radically due to factors that now sit largely outside of our control. It would be easy to derive a sense of futility, if not bleakness, from this realization. Despite his avowed pessimism—the title of one of his previous books is, after all, Reason in a Dark Time: Why the Struggle for Climate Change Failed —and What it Means for Our Future —Jamieson never succumbs to nihilism. Instead, he never ceases to inspire a deep appreciation for nature in all its plurality and complexity. The conflicts can be bleak, but we can derive a lot of meaning from them.

There is no harmony in the universe. We have to get acquainted to this idea that there is no real harmony as we have conceived it. But when I say this, I say this all full of admiration for the jungle. It is not that I hate it, I love it. I love it very much. But I love it against my better judgment.
— Werner Herzog (Burden of Dreams, 1982)

A few weeks ago, friend of the blog Robert Long brought to my attention clips of Werner Herzog discussing the jungle. The footage, drawn from Herzog’s 1982 documentary Burden of Dreams about the making of Fitzcarraldo, captures the director’s perspective on what he calls the “harmony of overwhelming and collective murder”:

Kinski always says it’s full of erotic elements. I don’t see it so much erotic. I see it more full of obscenity. It’s just… nature here is vile and base. I wouldn’t see anything erotical here. I would see fornication and asphyxiation and choking and fighting for survival and growing and just rotting away. Of course, there’s a lot of misery. But it is the same misery that is all around us. The trees here are in misery, and the birds are in misery. I don’t think they sing. They just screech in pain. It’s an unfinished country. It’s still prehistorical. The only thing that is lacking is the dinosaurs here. It’s like a curse weighing on an entire landscape. And whoever goes too deep into this has his share of this curse. So we are cursed with what we are doing here. It’s a land that God, if he exists, has created in anger. It’s the only land where creation is unfinished yet. Taking a close look at what’s around us there, there is some sort of a harmony. It is the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder. And we in comparison to the articulate vileness and baseness and obscenity of all this jungle, we in comparison to that enormous articulation, we only sound and look like badly pronounced and half-finished sentences out of a stupid suburban novel, a cheap novel. We have to become humble in front of this overwhelming misery and overwhelming fornication, overwhelming growth and overwhelming lack of order. Even the stars up here in the sky look like a mess. There is no harmony in the universe. We have to get acquainted to this idea that there is no real harmony as we have conceived it. But when I say this, I say this all full of admiration for the jungle. It is not that I hate it, I love it. I love it very much. But I love it against my better judgment. [Edited for clarity]

Wonderful.

If you’ve watched Fitzcarraldo or Aguirre, the Wrath of God, you probably know what he’s talking about. Why would anyone not born in the Amazonian jungle risk their life in the pursuit of shaky dreams? And yet they do.

Herzog maintains a distinctly dark and unsentimental view of nature. He sees the natural world as fundamentally indifferent, violent, and chaotic. In Grizzly Man, in a rare instance of explicit judgment, he criticizes Timothy Treadwell’s romanticized view of bears and wilderness, referring instead to nature’s “overwhelming indifference.” There is no harmony in nature. Pretending otherwise is a dangerous illusion. “[C]haos, hostility, and murder,” that’s “the common denominator of the universe.”

Herzog is fascinated by human folly in the face of this indifferent universe—Fitzcarraldo’s or Aguirre’s men dropping like flies, or Treadwell’s ultimate fusion with (consumption by) the bear. Unflinching and unsentimental, Herzog shows us the brutality and the beauty of the world against the vanity of dreams that cannot but be crushed. A sort of cosmic pessimism.

Mill’s nature

Doesn’t he look happy like a utilitarian? Nature sucks, John Stuart Mill famously… didn’t say. But close enough.

I’m preparing to teach Environmental Ethics again, exploring one of its central tensions: how do we motivate genuine concern for nature while acknowledging that nature is often horrid and indifferent? I talk about John Stuart Mill’s underrated 1874 essay “Nature”, where he argues that “living according to nature” or “following nature” are at best absurd, at worst immoral as practical recommendations. He identifies nature’s fundamental ambiguity:

• First, nature as everything governed by natural laws—the totality of phenomena. In this sense, everything is natural: your smartphone, nuclear reactors, human civilization itself.

• Second, nature as everything occurring without human intervention—what we usually mean when contrasting “natural” with “artificial.”

Here’s Mill’s dilemma: counseling humans to act according to nature in the first sense is meaningless—how else could they act? But counseling them to follow nature in the second sense proves immoral, because nature displays an overabundance of violence, ruthlessness, and hideous indifference to well-being. As Mill puts it, nature is “callous, ruthless, uncaring, violent, impervious to our sentiments of justice and fairness.” Also: “The workings of the non-human world are full of things that would be deemed the greatest crimes if men did them.” Predators tear apart prey while still alive. Natural disasters kill indiscriminately. If you chose to act like nature—causing massive suffering without regard for individual welfare—I would consider you not a Nietzschean Übermensch but a monster. Mill’s aim isn’t to vilify nature but to show that human civilization exists precisely to improve upon it, not mindlessly follow it.

Mill’ essay is a great way to teach students about the fallacy of the appeal to nature, which infers from the claim that something is natural (or unnatural) that it is thereby good (or bad).

This is, of course, too crude. There are ways of following nature that do not run afoul of Mill’s dilemma, when “follow” and “nature” are properly construed. I do not believe that Stoicism, Spinozism, or Daoism are either absurd or immoral doctrines. Still, more work is needed before you can take nature as your blueprint and live the good life.

Nietzsche, who didn’t like English utilitarians all that much, echoed Mill’s insights, knowingly or not. First, in The Gay Science:

Let us beware of thinking that the world is a living being. … The astral order in which we live is an exception; this order and the considerable duration that is conditioned by it have again made possible the exception of exceptions: the development of the organic. The total character of the world, by contrast, is for all eternity chaos, not in the sense of a lack of necessity but of a lack of order, organization, form, beauty, wisdom, and whatever else our aesthetic anthropomorphisms are called. Judged from the vantage point of our reason, the unsuccessful attempts are by far the rule; the exceptions are not the secret aim, and the whole musical mechanism repeats eternally its tune, which must never be called a melody. … When will all these shadows of god no longer darken us? When will we have completely de-deified nature? (§109, trans. Josefine Naukhoff and Adrian Del Caro)

Then, more explicitly aimed at the Stoics, Beyond Good and Evil, in which Nietzsche calls the Stoics’ command to live according to nature “a fraud”:

Imagine something like nature, profligate [and] indifferent without measure, without purpose. … How could you live according to this indifference? Living—isn’t that wanting specifically to be something other than this nature? … Assuming your imperative to “live according to nature” basically amounts to “living according to life”—well how could you not? … In fact, something quite different is going on: while pretending with delight to read the canon of your law in nature, you want the opposite. … Your pride wants to dictate and annex your morals and ideals onto nature. … For all your love of truth, you have forced yourselves so long, so persistently, and with such hypnotic rigidity to have a false, namely Stoic, view of nature, that you can no longer see it any other way. (§9, trans. Judith Norman)

Stoicism, for Nietzsche, faces something a bit similar to Mill’s dilemma. Suppose virtue consists in “living according to nature.” If nature is irrational and chaotic, then what good is it to make a virtue of following it? If, on the other hand, nature is inherently normative, this is owing to a teleological conception that Nietzsche and naturalists reject. Nature is not governed by reason. Nietzsche attributes the latter, anthropomorphic view to the Stoics.

Nature sucks. So why protect it?

The challenge requires defining two things: the scope of what matters in nature and the range of attitudes that warrant our attention. It may be that some non-instrumental, non-exploitative, non-destructive attitude—care, admiration, reverence, respect—will be warranted towards just about everything in nature. I’m not comfortable stipulating that any particular thing or process in nature fails to commend at least some minimal form of non-purely instrumental valuing attitude. Predation, illness, decay, sediments, magma, toxic gases, invasive plants? Could it be that they warrant something like awe, curiosity, or humility—attitudes that imply, if only tacitly, something other than a preference for destruction or commodification?

“Nature” in its broadest Millian sense proves too capacious if it includes everything that exists according to natural laws. But of course, that’s not what we typically mean by nature. Mill is absolutely right that following nature is terrible advice. But “don’t mindlessly destroy or despise nature” is different, and nothing in Mill’s argument suggests otherwise. From experience, Mill has never dissuaded my students from caring about the environment. So there's that.

Mill lets us see that nature is, as Tennyson famously put it, “red in tooth and claw”, and that is not all well and good. We must improve on nature. If, like Mill, you are a utilitarian, we must change nature to reduce the suffering and promote the happiness of all sentient creatures.

Interventionism

The wild animal suffering literature takes these facts as a call to action. Philosophers like Oscar Horta, Catia Faria, Kyle Johannsen, and many others acknowledge nature’s horror, dismissing the “idyllic view of nature,” and argue that this creates moral obligations to intervene. Our aim should be, in the words of Martha Nussbaum in Frontiers of Justice, “the gradual supplanting of the natural by the just.” Consider the reality:

In the deep snows the deer lies starving. Its ribs show stark beneath the matted hide, the belly hollow as a drum. For days it has not moved save to lift its head at sounds that might mean nothing. The snow packs around its legs like a tomb. Each breath costs more than the last. There is no rescue coming. There is no spring.

The ichneumon wasp has made of the caterpillar a living larder. The eggs hatch and the larvae begin their feeding, consuming the host from within while keeping it alive—alive and aware. Week by week they devour the organs in careful sequence, saving the heart and brain for last. The caterpillar continues to eat, to move, to feel the devourers working inside its body. This is not metaphor. This is Tuesday in the natural world.

The pox swells around the bird’s eyes until they seal shut. Tumors bulge from its beak until it cannot open to feed or drink. The bird sits on its branch in permanent darkness, slowly dying of thirst with water just beyond its reach. It will take days. There is no purpose to this suffering, no lesson, no meaning. Only the facts: blindness, thirst, death.1

To state the brute facts: these animals are dying a slow and painful death.

Wild animal welfare advocates accept something like Herzog’s descriptive view but reject his tragic acceptance. It is instead a call to action: herbivorize predators, engineer trophic chains, pave the forests! If nature truly contains this much suffering, doesn’t intentional concern for trapped beings become more significant, not less? Herzog’s cosmic pessimism doesn’t negate the reality of individual animal suffering; it might instead provide the strongest possible argument for why that suffering matters morally. For a variety of reasons (see e.g. this, that, and that too), I am not quite ready to endorse this move, but I see the appeal.

Herzog might crush such aspirations as another form of dangerous romanticism. The interventionist aspirations may be just an inverted form of idyllism. Where Timothy Treadwell romanticized nature as harmonious and loving, wild animal welfare advocates might be romanticizing our capacity to meaningfully reduce cosmic suffering. Herzog would probably see both as forms of hubris, failing to grasp the true scale and intractability of the forces we’re dealing with.2

In Encounters at the End of the World, his 2007 documentary about Antarctica, Herzog asks a local penguin expert about “deranged” or “insane” penguins. Penguins can be “disoriented”, the scientist replies. In the next scene, Herzog observes a lone penguin parting from his group (3’58” in the clip), and experts’ advice and a nearly universal (albeit oft-violated) presumption against interference among ecologists:

The rules for the humans are: do not disturb or hold up the penguin. Stand still and let him go on his way. And here, he’s heading off into the interior of the vast continent. With 5,000 kilometers ahead of him, he’s heading towards certain death. (5’01”)

This is a heartbreaking passage. There is nothing “good” about the penguin’s certain death. It serves no purpose. Tragically, even if we had allowed ourselves to intervene, this would have been in vain, for we were told that such penguins inevitably return to their fateful destination. The penguin was doomed by whatever force of nature inhabited him.

In Encounters, Herzog expresses ambivalent attitudes toward environmentalism. He deplores a certain obsession with conservation:

It occurred to me that in the time that we spent with him [a scientist] in the greenhouse possibly three or four languages have died. In our efforts to preserve endangered species we seem to overlook something equally important. To me, it’s a sign of a deeply disturbed civilization, where tree-huggers and whale-huggers in their weirdness are acceptable, while no one embraces the last speakers of a language.

At the same time, he notes:

[O]ur presence on this planet does not seem to be sustainable. Our technical civilization makes us particularly vulnerable. There is talk all over the scientific community about climate change. Many of them agree, the end of human life on this earth is assured. Human life is part of an endless chain of catastrophes, the demise of the dinosaurs being just one of these events. We seem to be next.

Thanks for the cheerful note, Werner.

From cosmic pessimism’s perspective, interventionism is like trying to bail out the ocean with a teacup—a dim light against the darkness but ultimately a cosmetic attempt to replace the “harmony of overwhelming and collective murder” and bridge the gap between human aspirations and cosmic reality. We might help some individuals locally and fix the human infrastructures that cause so much unnecessary suffering,3 but we’ll never address the deep structures of reality generating suffering. Herzog shows no shortage of praise for the admirable qualities—determination, idealism, nobility, kindness—displayed by his characters. But he is under no delusion. Aguirre’s dreams of empire were always meant to be consumed by the jungle. Treadwell was never going to save the bears, who didn’t really need saving to begin with.

Outer dark

Recently, I’ve been reading through Cormac McCarthy’s corpus while catching up on Herzog’s classics.

Both men share a clear-eyed, pessimistic, yet deeply poetic view of nature.4 Too bleak for my students, though some of them must have read The Road, and they’re exposed to doom nonstop. But I rely on Mill’s essay for its cleansing power. It rids them of romanticized conceptions and forces the question: Why exactly should I care about this [waves at all the horror taking place in nature]?

Throughout their work, McCarthy and Herzog express horror at the destruction we’ve wrought upon ourselves and upon the nonhuman world. If I do my job well, they experience the tension: nature is horrid yet beautiful, cruel and indifferent yet worth protecting, powerful yet vulnerable.

Nature is all of the following: the ruthless desert of McCarthy’s Southwest, the abominable jungle of Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo and Aguirre, the supervolcanoes that might wipe us out from the face of the earth, the creatures we wantonly harass, exploit, and destroy, the fences we erect to close the commons, and the ungodly energies we have extracted from the atom to erase, on a whim, whole populations and landscapes.5

One conviction I’ve taken from Herzog and McCarthy: there is infinite beauty in the world’s bleakness and darkness. Anyone reading Suttree, All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, or Blood Meridian must realize this. Consider this passage from All the Pretty Horses:

That night he dreamt of horses in a field on a high plain where the spring rains had brought up the grass and the wildflowers out of the ground and the flowers ran all blue and yellow far as the eye could see and in the dream he was among the horses running and in the dream he himself could run with the horses and they coursed the young mares and fillies over the plain where their rich bay and their rich chestnut colors shone in the sun and the young colts ran with their dams and trampled down the flowers in a haze of pollen that hung in the sun like powdered gold and they ran he and the horses out along the high mesas where the ground resounded under their running hooves and they flowed and changed and ran and their mains and tails blew off of them like spume and there was nothing else at all in that high world and they moved all of them in a resonance that was like a music among them and they were none of them afraid horse nor colt nor mare and they ran in that resonance which is the world itself and which cannot be spoken but only praised.

These are not the words of a nihilistic writer. People often mistake McCarthy’s pessimism for nihilism. This beauty has a cost. All the Pretty Horses again:

and he felt a loneliness he’d not known since he was a child and he felt wholly alien to the world although he loved it still. He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought the world’s heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world’s pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower.

As Alicia notes in Stella Maris, “The world has created no living thing that it does not intend to destroy.”

Yet consider these other gems:

In The Passenger, Bobby Western, Alicia’s brother, watches his friend Debussy disappear among tourists: “He watched her until she was lost among the tourists. Men and women alike turning to look after her. He thought that God’s goodness appeared in strange places. Don’t close your eyes.” This echoes Tobin the ex-priest’s words in Blood Meridian: “For let it go how it will, he said, God speaks in the least of creatures. The kid thought him to mean birds or things that crawl but the expriest, watching, his head slightly cocked, said: No man is give leave of that voice.” It is both, of course: the vilest men and the lowliest creatures all echo God’s voice.

John Sheddan, “The Long One”, in The Passenger (modeled on McCarthy's real friend), says: “Suffering is a part of the human condition and must be borne. But misery is a choice.”

In the NPR conversation, McCarthy said:

Well, some of my friends would probably tell you that making me pessimistic would be a difficult chore indeed. But I’m pessimistic about a lot of things. But as Lars has quoted me as saying, there is no reason to be miserable about it. (NPR, Science Friday, April 2011)

Yes.

• “It’s 90% mental and the other half is physical.”

• “It’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey.”

• “Find your why.”

• “Start slow, then slow down”

• “One mile at a time”

• “Trust the training.”

• “Dig deep.”

• “Keep moving forward.”

• “I’m never doing this again” (usually followed by signing up for another one)

• “Type 2 fun” (miserable during, but fun in retrospect)

Most of them are rather trite. But many of them ring true because they are. The problem with clichés is not that they’re false (they’re often true in some sense) but that they lack specificity and precision, they’re riddled with exceptions, and usually provide little actionable information. Some of those, however, are worth chewing on. And so you are warned, I will be rehearsing some clichés in what follows.

The setting

Last weekend, I started my sixth and completed my fourth 100-mile race, the Hellbender 100 near Old Fort, NC, which this year featured an alternate, and some say “easier,” course due to the devastation caused by Hurricane Helene last fall. The area was severely hit, and many of the trails are still closed. This alternate course did not look, at least on paper, as exciting as the original course. We did not ascend Mount Mitchell, for instance, the highest point east of the Mississippi. And we repeated some sections more than a beautiful loop course typically allows. Still, this was a challenging course (the repetition frankly didn’t help) with its own charms.

This essay is not a race report, breaking down the race section by section as well as covering training and race prep. It’s an art to write those well; most of them I find boring to read, so writing one, I can’t imagine. What I want to do instead is mull over some things I’ve learned running 100-milers.

What is a one-hundred-miler? It is a one-hundred-mile footrace! You have to complete the distance in as little time as possible, powered only by your own feet. Some will be a tad longer (Cruel Jewel, for instance, which I completed twice and quit once, hovers around 103-105 miles). Your GPS watch may record more or less than exactly 100 miles. But typically, that’s what the race distance is supposed to be. One hundred miles, or 160.9 kilometers. However, the most significant variation is terrain. You’ll find trail races, like those I’ve run, and road races. Flat and hilly courses. Desert, rolling hills, mountains, and swamps. I like mountainous races, even though I live and train on “flats” (after five years in pancake-flat Florida, I moved to pancake-flat Charleston, SC). Mountain races take a lot longer to complete, holding the distance fixed. That’s because elevation gain (aka “vert”) slows you down a lot. Unless you are vying for the top spots in a 100-miler, you’ll find yourself running very few hills on the way up. If you do, you’ll burn your wings before too long. Plus, the time you gain on the uphill, relative to a brisk walking pace (or “power-hiking”), is minor compared to its energetic cost. In other words, you’ll expend precious fuel for little payoff. Of course, if you can afford to run those hills conservatively without burning out, knock yourself out. Notice that I wrote “running very few hills on the way up”. This is because you’ll find yourself running a lot of the hills on the way down, at least unless and until your quads are completely trashed, which they may well be before too long. You can make up for quite a bit of time by running well downhill and on the flat sections while being strong and steady, but not hasty, on the uphill. Steady does it, patience pays off. Alright, so when you say you’ve run a hundred miles, you’re saying you’ve covered the distance basically non-stop, only pausing at aid stations to refuel, change socks, nurse a wound, etc. You’re not literally running the whole time.

Fake

Hellbender offers approximately 20,000 feet of elevation gain (and the same amount of loss since we arrive where we started). For comparison, Cruel Jewel offers 10k more elevation (and a few extra miles of distance). At approximately 30,000 (officially 33k) feet, it’s basically a Mount Everest worth of climbing (from sea level)! That’s in the same ballpark as some of the most legendary mountain ultras, such as Hardrock and UTMB, with no altitude and no alpine peaks, more like a Sisyphean accumulation of gnarly hills. I know from experience that 20,000 feet of climbing is an amount I can manage despite suboptimal training conditions. Cruel Jewel was tough, but I did it, and the hills per se were not the worst part. So I knew I could manage Hellbender. I finished Cruel Jewel in 33 hours in 2022, dropped midrace in 2023, and finished in 36 hours in 2024.

For Hellbender, I drafted three plans: a realistic 30-hour plan, an optimistic 28-hour plan, and a backup 33-hour plan. Best laid plans, as they say. Things didn’t go exactly as expected, which is precisely what you should expect. I finished in a time of 31 hours and 28 minutes, feeling like a million dollars in the last 25 miles after feeling like an arrogant fool humiliated by the mountain gods since mile 40. In the interim, I threw up, slept, shivered, hallucinated, and felt like I was on a death march. Things that usually help—watermelon, ramen—did not. Too many miles I walked on empty.

Until the actual nap (nearly an hour on a stretcher under layers of blankets to fight emerging hypothermia). About to officially drop, I made one last-ditch effort. The aid station volunteers kept mentioning their vegan options to my fellow runners, so I picked a half burrito. Spicy. Simple. Dry. But tasty and, most importantly, moving in the right direction (from my mouth to my stomach and not the other way around). Broth, a good cup of coffee, some fruit, and I was off, determined to complete the whole damn thing. When you have only 25 miles left, unless you’re injured or skirting with the cutoff times, you know you can finish. You just have to actually will it. (I warned you there’d be clichés.)

Uh oh. My legs felt like concrete. I was stone cold. Somehow this felt different, though. On my way uphill to Kitsuma Peak, where I lay on the stretcher for over an hour, my body and mind had practically shut down. On basic survival mode, I managed to painstakingly, slowly march my way up the mountain in order to drop out at the aid station, passed by dozens of more fortunate runners. I now realize I never actually said to the aid station captain that I wanted to drop, but only texted it to my wife, knowing she was asleep at our Airbnb. But after this burrito and the motivational ommph that got my ass off the stretcher, feeling stone cold was different. It felt like I just needed to warm back up, not that I was burning out. One step at a time (there’s another cliché), until the steps got quicker. I spent the last 40k/25M passed by none and passing many. This felt great. From the outside, it must have looked like mediocre running, but to me, it felt like I was flying. In the right circumstances, a positive feedback loop can kick off. The better you feel, the better you run; the better you run, the better you feel. In the right circumstances. Feel too good too early and you’re bound to burn your wings, which is probably what happened to me in the first 40 miles as I was on the totally unplanned pace of a sub-24-hour finish.

This is lesson number one: feeling fast makes you fast. Fake it until you make it. I was not injured, I knew I could—at last—keep enough calories down to maintain a decent pace until the end. Just apply the cliché with caution.

Unprepared

Here’s what I find intriguing—call it the paradox of preparedness. You know with near certainty that something will go wrong. Not just the predictable marathon miseries (bonking, bloody nipples, cramps), but a whole catalog of breakdowns more or less unique to ultrarunning: inability to swallow the very fuel you need to continue, violent rejection of foods you normally crave, hallucinations that turn trees into bears or children, cognitive decline that makes simple math impossible. I’ve discovered my body can literally walk while sleeping. Of course, sleep kicks in at 3 AM when you’re climbing a steep and muddy hill under the moon and a fading headlamp. Others report temporary blindness, scary animal encounters, sudden storms, or simply getting lost far off course. All this comes on top of the predictable tripping, sliding, toe-stubbing, and ankle-rolling.

The paradox bites deeper: while these setbacks are common enough to be catalogued, you can’t know which ones will visit you, or when, or in what combination. Maybe none will happen. Maybe you’ll troubleshoot them on the fly. Maybe they’ll arrive when you’re least equipped to handle them. The point is, the range of possible failures exceeds preparation. You can train for hills, fueling, sleep deprivation, muscle fatigue, and so on. This will narrow the range of likely setbacks. Still, for most of us, something will go wrong. And yet you will sign up again. Each race will be exactly the same in that each time will be different. But every race will itself be maddeningly repetitive: steps, hills, laps, out-and-backs, gels, refills, it’s all the same all over again, except it’s never the same. (I used to love but honestly have never really understood Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition. But it sounds apt here.)

This is the second lesson: expect the unexpected (or don't expect the expected to go as expected).

Steadfast

In a famous episode of Homer’s epic poem, Odysseus, the mythical Greek king of Ithaca, ties himself to the mast of his ship to be able to hear the Sirens’ beautiful song without being lured to his death. Cunning as he was, Odysseus knew he could not resist the seduction, which no mortal had heard and survived. He knew that, once he heard it, he would lose control of his rational faculties. So he decided to use them in advance to bind himself, literally and figuratively, by ordering his crew to plug their ears with wax and to tie him tightly to the mast. Most crucially, he commanded them not to untie him, no matter how much he begged, pleaded, or ordered them to do so.

How does this pertain to running a hundred miles? No, a race is not an odyssey. But if you’re lucky enough to have a crew, you will give them instructions. I generally don’t have a crew, except last year when my wife and daughters showed up at a handful of aid stations with a cooler, a chair, and a grab bag of essentials. Last weekend, I only saw them once, at a crucial aid station. Here’s the crucial part: my wife knows she is not supposed to let me quit, even if I tell her to (either in person or by text). She has internalized the strong motivation of my pre-race self to persist no matter what (barring injury or force majeure), despite anything my mid-race self could say. And so, since we have not instituted a safe word, I am stuck, even if I really want to quit. It worked last year and this year too. In other words, my trust in my wife’s judgment becomes my commitment device. I metaphorically tied myself to the mast of her steadfastness so that the sirens of the aid station—“look at that chair!”; “oh, the car is right there, we could go home and watch a movie!”—cannot work their magic. Mid-race, in the depths of suffering, most runners’ judgment will be compromised. (This is probably not the time to sign contracts or make major life decisions.) Be like Ulysses, accept that you will be enchanted by the sirens of the DNF (“did not finish”), but don’t allow yourself to act on this particular mid-race preference.

This is the third lesson: tie yourself to a mast, you’ll be glad you did (when it’s over).

Sick

With all that being said, there is one feeling you cannot fight, which will overwhelm you and dwarf the pains, burns, itches, and cramps. Enter nausea. In his 1938 novel, La nausée (Nausea), the French existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre described the narrator Roquentin’s recognition of the utter “facticity” or contingency of existence, the feeling that everything is pointless. Imagine feeling like this, finding justification for nothing, familiar objects in your life losing their apparent purpose, appearing simply there yet irreparably out of place, and your own existence striking just like that of an inert brick that happens to be there for no reason. Objects, people, and events are and happen, but for no reason, to no end. This awareness of the sheer existence of other things as well as yourself as meaningless must be, well, rather unpleasant. Sartre, ever the existentialist, offered Roquentin a way out we all have: we are radically free. The meaningless universe offers us, at every juncture, opportunities to create meaning through our choices (even through our refusal to make choices). Does this help? Not quite yet, because the sense of radical freedom is itself nauseating. No matter what you choose, you are responsible; you can’t just sit and coast, basking in the peaceful admission of facticity. This sucks.

Well, running a hundred miles is a little bit like that (of course it is, if Sartre is correct about the universality of both meaninglessness and freedom). First, literally. Nausea has become the major performance bottleneck for me in distances longer than 50 miles. It gets powerful enough that drinking enough water, let alone eating energy gels, pretzels, bars, PB&Js, or most other snacks, appears virtually impossible. You try, and then you chew, and then you spit out from your mouth, or else your stomach will churn it back shortly afterwards. But it’s not just food—the feeling is diffuse and pervasive. It ends up extending to the whole endeavor. The nausea covers food and other objects, and it is both literal (a physical sensation of sickness) and figurative (a Sartrean mix of visceral revulsion and anguish). The trail itself becomes sickeningly superfluous, while the body—this bag of failing systems, cramping muscles, and churning stomach—confronts you with its brute facticity. One striking thing about nausea, at least to me, is how powerful it can be. It’s as if other unpleasant experiences, most notably pain, recede in the background. Of course, the sensations are all tangled up, and the cognitive fog that kicks in over time doesn’t make you better at discriminating them. But you can get over the pain. I find it much harder to get over the nausea.

And so you can look at the race as a microcosm of existence: what you experience as you “run” is a more intense or concentrated version of the latent feeling of existential despair befalling a radically free human like Roquentin. And as you do, the race makes you reflect, with sadness, disgust, and anguish, about your whole life. Why am I doing this (plus all the other things)? Sishyphus knew, and I can’t imagine him happy in this moment: life just sucks. (Note the irony: the ultrarunner keeps signing up for those races, knowing all too well how it goes.)

I thought I might end here, lessons learned and crushed by the facticity of existence, the overwhelming nausea it is bound to induce in the reflective person, and the Sisyphean boulders we keep pushing over absurd hills. But this is not what I learned. What I learned is that nausea is transient and illusory. In its literal, physical manifestation, it is very real. But vomit is just vomit. And after a few trials, I’ve now learned that food can sit quite well on the empty stomach of a runner rejuvenated by the belief they have left the physical cause of their nausea behind at the aid station. In its figurative manifestation, nausea is self-indulgence with your immediate, present self, as if what it felt and believed was imbued with some kind of authority or special insight. But you come to the race as a bundle. Months of training, your pre-race self, your crew and supporters, your pre-commitment devices, and the volunteers and race directors. You can think of the union of the pre- and post-race selves as the “principal” who has contracted with, delegated authority to, an “agent,” the nauseated running self, for them to make certain decisions on their behalf, to achieve certain goals. Unfortunately for the agent, they have to stick through it when it sucks because they are not here to benefit themselves. I have found that fragmenting the self in this way helps to reframe the suffering experienced on the run as part of a story we tell ourselves to make meaning and create value. I’ve explored this idea, in Nietzschean terms, in my paper, “Strangers to ourselves.” One of my central claims is that we can’t reliably know whether our suffering is intrinsically bad through introspection.

This lesson number four (a bit of a mouthful): know that you will be a stranger to yourself and act accordingly—scaffold your agency and integrate your suffering into a meaningful story of overcoming.

What can you do

In its succinct restatement made famous by Deleuze, the seventeenth-century philosopher Spinoza noted that no one has yet determined what the body can do, or “laid down the limits to the powers of the body”. (Ethics, pt. 3, prop. 2) There is much to unpack here, but one thing Spinoza meant was that we knew then and know now very little about how bodies work, much less how they interact with the mind, which is just another aspect of the same thing for Spinoza. He was right: at 3 AM, you have no idea what your body can do. Don’t listen to the sirens, listen to your wife.

Post-mortem: What I have (not) learned

I am of necessity a stranger to myself. There are corners of my soul that the introspective nature of this essay cannot shed light on. I will sign up for another race knowing what I know—including that it will suck, I will experience nausea, something will go wrong—because I do not really know who I am. We are such confabulators and self-deceivers. I will forget the sirens’ songs. I will remember my wife’s mast and my daughters screaming in ecstasy anytime they saw me. They make for good stories. They are who I am too.

Jazz

I don’t follow the state of jazz anywhere near enough to compile a meaningful list of the best jazz of the year, so these are just recent releases I dig. For more varied selections, check out Nate Chinen at the Gig, Hank Shteamer in the NY Times, and Chinen again at NPR.

Brad Mehldau has to be one of the most eclectic and productive living jazz musicians. I’ve followed Mehldau since the early 2000s. I have not loved everything he’s released but he always tries new things and it’s never mediocre or boring.

• After Bach II

• Après Fauré

• Rick Beato interview

• I would like to like his Beatles album, Your Mother Should Know, but these are mostly songs I do not know (not being a Beatles connoisseur), so the covers don’t resonate with me. I should give it another try and listen to the originals on the side. The album includes a Bowie cover too! His previous Beatles covers (“Blackbird”, “Dear Prudence”, “Mother Nature’s son”, “Martha my dear”, “She’s leaving home”) are all marvelous.

Chris Potter, Got the Keys to the Kingdom: Live at the Village Vanguard

• Potter is my favorite living jazz saxophonist; I saw him perform with Lowcountry at the Spoleto Festival last spring and at a masterclass at a local jazz academy the next day. Incredible. Like Mehldau, he is not only an awesome musician but ridiculously productive.

• This is a recording of the band (Potter + Craig Taborn on piano, Scott Colley on bass, and Marcus Gilmore on drums) playing at the Vanguard in 2022. I saw them there, though not that particular night, and it was that good.

Chris Potter, Brad Mehldau, John Patitucci, Brian Blade, Eagle’s Point

• Gather some of the world’s greatest jazz musicians, who all know each other really well, and well, you get superb music.

MTB (Brad Mehldau, Mark Turner, Peter Bernstein), Solid Jackson (ft. Larry Grenadier and Bill Stewart)

• Back together again! Turner, especially post-2008 injury Turner, can be acquired taste, but he’s obviously interesting.

• The original MTB, Consenting Adults (recorded in 1994(!), released in 2000), was an old favorite of mine. Cole Porter’s “'From this moment on” is awesome.

Some excellent New York swing:

• Joe Farnsworth, In What Direction Are You Headed?

• Bill Charlap Trio, And Then Again (Live)

Trio Grande (Will Vinson, alto, Gilad Hekselman, guitar, Nate Wood, drums, bass, keyboard), Urban Myth

• Their first, eponymous album, with Antonio Sánchez instead of Nate Wood, was a blast. Sánchez, of the movie Birdman fame, is excellent, but Nate Wood makes this new release even quirkier. Check out Wood’s YouTube channel. This isn’t gimmicky, this may just be out-of-this-worldly genius. Though recall, the world is weird and wonderful.

• Check out Gilad Hekselman’s Live at the Village Vanguard

Kurt Rosenwinkel, my favorite jazz guitarist, whom I was lucky to see twice in Paris, is also very productive. The latest live album is top-notch, non-experimental Rosenwinkel. His early albums engendered an enthralled fanbase, which I joined in 2009, and we are now blessed with the release of a 1996 gig at Smalls, which is, incidentally, the first NYC jazz club I ever went to, in 2007 (guitarist Mike Moreno was blossoming then). I’m also including his album with singer Geri Allen. Less my cup of tea but nonetheless charming.

• The Next Step Band (Live at Smalls, 1996)

• with Geri Allen, A Lovesome Thing

• Undercover (Live at the Village Vanguard)

Joshua Redman, Where We Are

• Mehldau, Potter, and Rosenwinkel are some of the most influential living jazz musicians for a reason: they are instantly recognizable and yet always innovating. Redman is no exception. I have a preference for the rough-edges Coltrane-Potter pipeline over the smoother Rollins-Redman (this is an overly crude simplification). Still, you can’t go wrong with him.

McCoy Tyner, Joe Henderson, Forces of Nature: Live at Slugs’

• I have not listened to that one yet but it must be great

• From Blue Note: “Forces of Nature: Live at Slugs’ is a never-before-issued live recording of jazz legends McCoy Tyner and Joe Henderson leading a stellar quartet with bassist Henry Grimes and drummer Jack DeJohnette at the hallowed lost NYC jazz shrine, Slugs' Saloon, in 1966. Originally recorded by the legendary engineer Orville O’Brien … the tape has been in DeJohnette’s personal archives for nearly 60 years and is now being released for the very first time.

Lowcountry, Lowcountry (ft. Matt White, Ronald Daise, Chris Potter, Charleston Symphony Orchestra)

• This is, more or less, the record for what I saw at the Spoleto Festival, though you have to see it live.

Tessa Lark, The Stradgrass Sessions

• a very interesting violinist; features jazz, Americana, and classical

Classical

Make of that what you will, but a few of my picks were also in the selection of the New York Times. I will add the rest of their list to my library. Also check out Tyler Cowen’s classical music listening of the year. I am not 100% sure he is correct, but Cowen writes “The best recordings of classical music — ever — are being created now.” I don’t know if people realize how lucky they are to live in a world in which they can so easily access so much wonderful music.

Chamber music

Beethoven for Three (Yo-Yo Ma, Leonidas Kavakos, Emanuel Ax) is a lovely, perfectly executed, and fun project. Piano reductions of symphonies (e.g. by Liszt) are interesting, and, of course, enabled wider access to musical works before the age of recorded music, but they remain far removed from the actual thing. Somehow there is less of a gap between an energetic trio and a symphony orchestra than there is between solo piano and trio. There are three albums (I hope there are more to come, but I am not sure):

• Symphonies No. 2 and 5

• Symphony No. 6 “Pastorale” and Op. 1 No. 3

• Symphony No. 4 and Op. 97 “Archduke”

Doric String Quartet, Beethoven: String Quartets, Vol. 1-2

• These two volumes include Opp. 18 (No. 1, 2, 5, 6), 59 “Razumovsky” (No. 1, 2), 95 “Serioso”, 127, 130, and 133.

• Their recordings of Haydn, Mozart, and Mendelssohn are very fine too.

Joshua Bell, Steven Isserlis, Jeremy Denk, Mendelssohn Piano Trios

Trio Sōra

• Brahms: Piano Trios Opp. 8 & 87

• Brahms: Piano Trio Op. 101, Trio for Horn Op. 40, Wiegenlied Op. 49, No. 1

Akiko Suwanai, Evgeni Bozhanov, Brahms: The Sonatas for Piano and Violin

Orchestral works

Martin Fröst (dir. and clarinet), Swedish Chamber Orchestra

• Mozart: Ecstasy and Abyss [Leipzig, 1789] (ft. Lucas Debargue, piano)

• Mozart: Ecstasy and Abyss [Prague, 1791]

Ensemble Pygmalion, Raphaël Pichon, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Requiem

• Interesting account interspersed with earlier choral work

Robert Levin (piano), Academy of Ancient Music, et al. Mozart: Piano Concertos

• the complete set, in which Levin plays a historical pianoforte and does not shy away from improvisation, is original and overall remarkable

• see the NY Times feature

Paavo Järvi, Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich, Mendelssohn: Symphonies

• Still underrated, one of my favorite composers.

Semyon Bychkov, Czech Philharmonic, Central European music at its best:

• Mahler: Symphony No. 1

• Mahler: Symphony No. 2 (ft. Christiane Karg, Elisabeth Kulman, Prague Philharmonic Choir)

• Dvořák: Symphonies No. 7, 8, 9

Ben Kim, Concertgebouw Chamber Orchestra, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: The First Vienna Concertos (Piano Concertos No. 11-12-13)

• Mozart started composing stellar piano concertos long before the most famous Vienna concertos (from No. 20 and on). No. 13 is one of my favorites.

Concert de la Loge, Julien Chauvin

• Vivaldi: Le Quattro Stagioni & La Follia

• Legacy (ft. Christian-Pierre La Marca, cello)

• Check out the rest of their catalog, especially the Haydn and Mozart

Jean-Guihen Queyras (cello), Ensemble Resonanz, Riccardo Minasi, Antonín Kraft, Carl Philip Emmanuel Bach: Cello Concertos

• I didn’t know of Kraft, CPE Bach deserves to be recorded more.

Vilde Frang (violin), Robin Ticciati, Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, Elgar: Violin Concerto, Op. 61

• Not as famous as his cello concerto or some of the major violin concertos (Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Sibelius)

• I don’t know enough of and about Elgar; I sense he is probably underrated.

Anastasia Kobekina, Venice

• Cello, around Venice, from Renaissance to contemporary.

L’Arpegiatta, Christina Pluhar, Wonder Women

• The ensemble describes the project as “music by and about women.” “On the one hand, it is a homage to all the wonderful female composers of the 17th century, but also to all the talented female musicians of all times who too often had to hide their talent behind their husbands or give up their careers too early. On the other hand, Christina Pluhar also draws her inspiration from the traditional music of South America and Italy and looked for songs that tell stories about extraordinary, strong, courageous but also sad women.”

Solo works

Grigory Sokolov (piano), Purcell & Mozart (Live)

Raphaël Feuillâtre (guitar), Visages baroques

• Bach, Rameau, Duphly

Janne Valkeajoki (accordion), Rameau

Théo Ould (accordion), Laterna Magica

• Rameau, Bach, and contemporary works

• the accordion is (unsurprisingly?) well-suited to baroque music

Constance Luzzati (harp), Enharmonique Rameau

Fazil Say (piano), Oiseaux Tristes. Couperin, Debussy, Ravel

Keith Jarrett (piano), Carl Philip Emmanuel Bach

Ismaël Margin (piano), Mozart: Fantasy

Marc-André Hamelin, Beethoven: Hammerklavier (Piano Sonatas Op. 106 & Op. 2 No. 3)

Yuja Wang (piano), The Vienna Recital

Rudolf Buchbinder (piano), Brahms - Reger: Song Transcriptions

Sontraud Speidel (piano)

• Fanny Mendelssohn: Charakterstücke

• Fanny Mendelssohn: Klaviermusik 1821-1846

Igor Levit (piano)

• Fantasia

• with Wiener Philharmoniker, Christian Thieleman, Brahms (Piano Concertos & Solo Piano Opp. 116-119)

Bach

There is enough for a dedicated section.

Two excellent recordings of the violin concertos:

• Leonidas Kavakos, The Apollon Ensemble, Bach: Violin Concertos

• Lina Tur Bonnet, Musica Alchemica, Himmelsburg: Bach - Violin Concertos

Piano

Francesco Tristano, Bach: The 6 Partitas

Rochelle Sennet, Bach to Black: Suites for Piano (Vol. I-II-III)

• pairs Bach suites with works by Black composers

Organ and harpsichord

Emmeran Rolin (organ), Vibrance #2

Masaaki Susuki

• Organ Works: Vol. 3-5

• The Kunst der Fuge (harpsichord)

• Check out Tyler Cowen’s conversation with Suzuki

Benjamin Alard, The Complete Works for Keyboard: Vol. 8-9

Jörg Halubek, Organ Landscapes

Christophe Rousset

• Bach: The Complete Toccatas

• Bach: Die Kunst der Fuge

Arrangements, transcriptions, and other

D!ssonanti (ensemble), Bach

Matthieu Delage (sax) et al., Bach

Plínio Fernandes (guitar), Bacheando

• Bach and Brazilian music

Duo Tal and Groethuysen (piano), J.S. Bach: Transkriptionen

Víkingur Ólafsson (piano), Continuum - EP

• Bach cantatas and chorales

Alexandre Tharaud (piano), Bach

• uneven, not the best Tharaud I’ve heard, but contains some interesting transcriptions

Pop, folk, punk

Taylor Swift, THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT: THE ANTHOLOGY

• it is quite good; somehow we can’t get too much of Taylor Swift in the family

• and of course, The Eras Tour (we saw her in Tampa early in April 2023)

Cat Power, Cat Power Sings Dylan: The 1966 Royal Albert Hall Concert

• I was fortunate to see her and her band perform the album live in Charleston

Phoebe Bridgers (Punisher [2020]) / Boygenius (The Record and The Rest - EP)

• my wife sometimes makes fun of me for liking her but I really do

Adrianne Lenker, Bright Future

• I’ve barely listened to that one, but I liked her previous albums and her band Big Thief too.

NOFX

• Their latest, Half Album - EP (2024), is (maybe?) the last bit of recent material left to release after Double Album (2022) and Single Album (2021). They’re all mixed bags but all include at least one really good song (“Darby crashing your party”, “Don’t count on me”, “The last drag”, “I love you more than you hate me”, “Linewleum”, “Doors and fours”). And it’s still much better punk rock than average. Consider this: they continued releasing new music as they prepared for retirement, after a forty-year uninterrupted career. They are, to me, the greatest punk rock band ever, though Bad Religion—whom I got to see in Charleston last spring!—comes close. I’m not interested in litigating this.

• final tour; see the NY Times writeup; sadly, I couldn’t go to the show I had booked in Orlando in 2023, but I bought the video of their final shows in San Pedro, Los Angeles, CA

Regional Justice Center, Freedom, Sweet Freedom

• recent discovery, incidentally relevant to my politics seminar—effective screaming hardcore with first-hand criminal justice system commentary

Personal

My five-year-old started violin at school. They are using the Suzuki method, so we’re listening to this a lot: Takako Nishizaki, Terrence Dennis, Suzuki Evergreens, Vol. 1.

Substacks you should read

• Transitional Technology (Ethan Iverson)

  • jazz geekery, commentary, and more

• A Year of Bach (Evan Goldfine)

  • Goldfine spent a year going through Bach’s catalog

• Playback with Lewis Porter!

  • jazz history and archives

• Hyperdimensional (Dean W. Ball)

  • mostly about AI but will sometimes talk about Beethoven

In Memoriam

• Lou Donaldson (b. 1926)

  • Ethan Iverson’s tribute

• Benny Golson (b. 1929)

  • Iverson’s tribute

• Françoise Hardy (b. 1944)

• Roy Haynes (b. 1926)

  • Iverson’s tribute, including awesome anecdotes and excerpts, parts 1, 2, 3

• Quincy Jones (b. 1933)

  • Iverson’s tribute

• Albert ‘Tootie’ Heath (b. 1938)

  • Iverson’s tribute (I saw them play together at the Vanguard a while back, it was very sweet)

• Seiji Ozawa (b. 1935)

• Maurizio Pollini (b. 1942)

  • I saw him play Chopin at Carnegie Hall in 2010 (yes, I got to hear a lot of great music in New York); he already seemed long past his peak, but this was nonetheless a marvelous night. Pollini introduced me to Beethoven’s late sonatas with his incredible 1977 recording.

    

Fiction

Life is cruel: there isn’t enough time for most mortals to read all the great novels.

Novels

Émile Zola, Nana (3.5/5)

• Late 19th-century Paris was both splendid and ugly. Zola specialized in minutely describing decadence, squalor, vice, and misery. That he did it beautifully remains contentious. The only other Zola novel I had read, L’assommoir, is bleaker, closer to pure misery, a genuine piece of naturalisme. Nana is often amusing. However, under the pretense of scientific observation, Zola’s judgment pervades the novel.

Honoré de Balzac, Illusions perdues (5/5)

Honoré de Balzac, Père Goriot (5/5)

• I read both in a row, and both had been unforgivable omissions. I very much prefer Balzac’s Comédie Humaine to Zola’s Rougon-Macquart genealogy. Illusions perdues may be a tad too long, Père Goriot is almost too short, but they are both delightful.

Jane Austen, Emma (5/5)

• I’m cheating writing because I haven’t finished it, but I have no reason to think the remaining pages will change my judgment. I read and loved Sense and Sensibility, my first Austen novel, in 2023. Emma is lots of fun. Next year: Persuasion.

George Orwell, 1984 (4/5)

• Another one of those unforgivable omissions. I read it alongside Scott (see below), which was a great pairing. It’s incredible how many neologisms and ideas from the novel have entered popular culture (e.g. newspeak, doublethink, thoughtcrime, and memory hole). The characters lack depth, and Orwell’s style is very (and, if I understand, purposefully) plain and transparent. This is outweighed by insightful, prescient analysis and invention.

Elizabeth Taylor, The Soul of Kindness (5/5)

Elizabeth Taylor, At Mrs Lippincote’s (4/5)

• Not the actress but the English novelist I only learned about a couple of years ago. Extremely subtle and perceptive, tender and incisive. Most of her novels are fairly short, but those two are deceptively simple.

Cormac McCarthy, Cities of the Plain (The Border Trilogy, #3) (5/5)

• The final part of the Border Trilogy, where Billy Parham’s and John Grady Cole’s paths converge. I read the first two parts, All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing, in 2023, both of which were incredible. It takes a while to get into this one, but it ends up packed with action, awesome dialogues, and McCarthy’s unique way of mixing the sublime and the bleak to tell you the truth, which of course is terrible.

• In the spring, a student is doing an independent study on McCarthy with me. I very much look forward to it and will read his last two novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris, and re-read Blood Meridian, some thirteen years later. Oh, and yes, I am aware of the Vanity Fair bombshell. People contain multitudes; life is complicated; McCarthy was no saint. If anything, this should make you want to read more McCarthy, but to each their own.

Benjamín Labatut, When We Cease to Understand the World (5/5)

• Read during my physics/nuclear weapons phase. Fictionalized pieces on scientists and mathematicians including Heisenberg, Haber, Schwartzchild, and Groethendiek, on war, destruction, and madness. Magnificent. The author is Chilean. Adrian Nathan West’s translation is excellent (as far as I can judge). I may pick up The Maniac, a sort of fictionalized biography of another one of the greatest minds of the 20th century, John von Neumann.

Lauren Groff, The Vaster Wilds (5/5)

• I’m a fan of Groff. I’ve loved her collections of short stories, Delicate Edible Birds and especially Florida, and two of her previous novels, Fates and Furies and The Monsters of Templeton. This one, about a girl escaping into the wilderness from the starving Jamestown colony in 1609-1610, is raw, gripping, and poetic.

Aki Shimazaki, Tsubaki (Le poids des secrets, #1) (3/5)

• Seduced by the atomic bomb pitch, I was disappointed with the hackneyed plot and bland style. Thankfully brief.

Short stories

Jorge Luis Borges, “Death and the compass” and “The circular ruins”

• Borges is fantastic. Obligatory companion podcast for these two: Very Bad Wizards, episodes 282 and 293.

Octavia E. Butler, “Bloodchild”, “The evening and the morning and the night”

• Failed to complete the Bloodchild and other stories collection. I should try her again with a novel.

Nonfiction

Russ Roberts, Wild Problems: A Guide to the Decisions that Define Us (3/5)

Cal Newport, Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World (4/5)

Katie Arnold, Running Home (3/5)

Norman Lebrecht, Why Mahler? How One Man and Ten Symphonies Changed Our World (1/5)

In 2024, I wanted to read more about physics, physicists, and nuclear weapons. I also watched Nolan’s Interstellar and Oppenheimer and a few documentaries and listened to a bunch of podcasts. Apart from the Jacobsen, all of the following were illuminating and enjoyable.

Janna Levin, Black Hole Survival Guide (5/5)

Sean Carroll, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself (5/5)

Sean Carroll, The Biggest Ideas in the Universe: Space, Time, and Motion (5/5)

Claudia de Rham, The Beauty of Falling: A Life in Pursuit of Gravity (4/5)

Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (5/5)

Annie Jacobsen, Nuclear War: A Scenario (2/5)

• I’m including this one in its intended category, but really, it’s a work of fiction, no matter what people, including the author, say. This 80,000 Hours interview was the cherry on top. Very frustrating. I wish the interviewer had done her homework.

William Egginton, The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Nature of Reality (4/5)

James C. Scott, Seeing Life a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (5/5)

James C. Scott, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States (5/5)

• I learned about James C. Scott in 2017. Someone recommended I read Seeing Like a State (and/or maybe Against the Grain, which had just been published). For some reason, I put it off for too long. Scott died last summer, which prompted me to finally read those books. It doesn’t get any better than this. As mentioned, they paired well with 1984. They strengthened my distaste for bureaucracies, surveillance, and top-down control over people’s lives, and gave me some ideas for writing. Seeing Like a State is the true masterpiece, but Against the Grain was pretty great too.

James C. Scott, Two Cheers for Anarchism: Six Easy Pieces on Autonomy, Dignity, and Meaningful Work and Play (4/5)

• This one is lighter, more hastily written, and rehashes some material from previous books, but it’s still enjoyable and illuminating. Don’t read it to learn more about anarchism per se!

Academic

Includes some books I haven’t finished but read big enough chunks of.

Philosophy

Sabrina Little, The Examined Run: Why Good People Make Better Runners (4.5/5)

• More philosophers are runners than you would suspect. Sabrina is the only professional runner who is also a professional philosopher that I know of. An accomplished ultrarunner, Sabrina has written a rare book-length treatment of the role of virtues and vices, both moral and intellectual, in running. Engaging, witty, and accessible, this should be enjoyable for runners and philosophers alike.

Toby Ord, The Precipice (4/5)

Theron Pummer, The Rules of Rescue: Cost, Distance, and Effective Altruism (4/5)

Larry Temkin, Being Good in a World in Need (4/5)

• The most compelling philosophical critique of the international aid side of effective altruism, by an early adopter and advocate of the movement. Empirically informed and carefully written, it is in some way heart-wrenching because it is written by an insider, unlike most of the (usually pretty bad) critiques of EA. The movement still has to wrestle with this one. Note that I do not think it undermines EA’s mission or tools.

Daniel Dennett, Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting (5/5)

• Another great mind lost in 2024 and another blond spot of mine. Originally published in 1984, it has aged remarkably well. I lean toward free will skepticism, but this is more than you could ask for by way of assuaging your practical concerns.

Matt King, Joshua May (eds.), Agency in Mental Disorder (4/5)

• A mixed collection. Some weaker pieces. Overall pretty interesting and informative. I especially liked Clarke-Doane and Tabb on addiction and Shoemaker on the moral costs of exemption from accountability.

Michael Bratman, Structures of Agency: Essays (4/5)

• You could say Bratman is repetitive. The theme works, though, and lends itself to fecund variations. I have found his work quite helpful in thinking about animal agency.

Jenann Ismael, How Physics Makes Us Free (3/5)

Erich Hatala Matthes, What to Save and Why: Identity, Authenticity, and the Ethics of Conservation (4/5)

Clare Mac Cumhall and Rachel Wiseman, Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life (3/5)

The following I read for class.

Jake Monaghan, Just Policing (5/5)

• Monaghan is remarkable. A concise yet powerful non-ideal theory of just policing, dealing intelligently with issues of legitimacy, risk, discretion, and separation of powers, among others.

Tommie Shelby, The Idea of Prison Abolition (5/5)

Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (3.5/5)

Brandon del Pozo, The Police and the State (4/5)

Carissa Véliz, The Ethics of Privacy and Surveillance (4/5)

Animals

Rebecca Giggs, Fathoms: The World in the Whale (4/5)

Peter S. Alagona, The Accidental Ecosystem: People and Wildlife in American Cities (5/5)

Michael Tomasello, The Evolution of Agency: Behavioral Organization from Lizards to Humans (4/5)

Brandon Keim, Meet the Neighbors: Animal Minds and Life in a More-than-Human World (3.5/5)

Bethany Brookshire, Pests: How Humans Create Animal Villains (4/5)

Mary Roach, Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law (3/5)

Graphic novels, comic books

Jim Ottaviani, Leland Myrick, Feynman (4/5)

Matthew Inman (The Oatmeal), Why my Cat is More Impressive than your Baby (4/5)

Clément Baloup, J’aurais pu devenir millionaire, j’ai choisi d’être vagabond (4/5)

Some highlights from spring 2024 teaching

PHIL 101

• Plato, Theatetetus

• Plato, The Ring of Gyges (from Republic)

• Zhuangzi, “Happiness of fish” and “Butterfly dream”

• Correspondence between Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia and René Descartes

• Daniel Dennett, “Where am I?”

• Mary Midgley, “Philosophical plumbing”

• Elizabeth Anscombe, “Mr Truman’s Degree”

• L.A. Paul on becoming a vampire (from Transformative Experience)

Seminar on police, prisons, privacy, and speech

• Renée Jorgensen, “Algorithms and the individual in criminal law”

• Jake Monaghan, Just Policing

• Christopher Lewis and Adaner Usmani, "The injustice of under-policing in America

• Hi-Phi Nation, seasons 3 and 4

• Cesare Beccaria, On Crimes and Punishment (excerpts)

• Discussions of privacy and surveillance (Andrei Marmor, Anita Allen, Carissa Véliz, Luke William Hunt)

• J.S. Mill, On Liberty

Overall, a pretty good year. Happy New Year and happy reading!

https://doi.org/10.26556/jesp.v28i1.2800

What kinds of moral agents are there? Computers and cars are not moral agents. Now imagine you are walking past a playground. The children are agents, but you are reluctant to hold them morally responsible. Likewise, maybe the dogs playing at the park are agents of some sort but not moral agents. They are playing by some tacit rules, but those are not moral. The realm of agents is larger than that of moral agents. Only the latter are open to attributions of moral responsibility and reactive attitudes. Parents are morally responsible and can be blameworthy for what happens to their children and their dogs. But if children or dogs fight at the park, they may be reprimanded, not held morally responsible. There are important differences between our responses to children and dogs. For instance, children will normally become moral agents; dogs will not. Children need and dogs need not be brought into scaffolding practices where we hold each other accountable and raise budding agents. The standards we apply to children are sensitive not just to what they are but also to what they are starting to become and the contexts in which they grow up.

In my article, “Letting animals off the hook,” recently published in the Journal of Ethics & Social Philosophy (open access), I argue take up the issue of animal morality—the topic of a rapidly growing philosophical literature—and argue that most proponents of the existence of animal morality face a dilemma. According to a prominent family of views of moral responsibility, the facts that motivate claims of animal morality are sufficient for many animals to be morally responsible. Some authors accept this consequence, but many deny it by appealing to a putative difference between “moral subjects” and “moral agents”. In the article, I argue that if they want to deny animals’ moral responsibility, they are committed to a much less impressive account of animals’ moral abilities. In a nutshell, either moral subjects are moral agents or they are not really moral.

Contrary to much of this literature, I also express some skepticism concerning the benefits of regarding, let alone treating, other animals as moral, whether to praise or blame them. While I only briefly touch upon the issue in the article, I address the issue in depth in a working paper, arguing that the empirical and philosophical literature on animal morality is subject to non-negligible inductive risks. Independently of whether moral abilities give rise to distinctive moral claims or moral status, I question the pervasive assumption that it would be better for animals to be seen as capable of acting morally.

Several other interesting papers have come out since I finished this paper, check them out too!

• Erik Nelson, Kantian animal moral psychology: empirical markers for animal morality in Ergo (also open access)

• Rhys Borchert and Aliya R. Dewew, In praise of animals in Biology and Philosophy, winner of the inaugural Philosophy of Animal Minds and Behavior Prize

I would say I did my best to cover most of the pertinent literature in the article, but there were inevitable omissions. Apologies to anyone whose work I omitted.

Work

Classes

For my Politics, Philosophy, and Law (PPLW) seminar on policing, prisons, privacy, and speech (highlights):

• Jake Monaghan, Just Policing

• Tommie Shelby, The Idea of Prison Abolition

• Brandon del Pozo, The Police and the State

• Charles W. Mills, “‘Ideal theory’ as ideology”

• Christopher Lewis and Adaner Usmani, “The injustice of under-policing in America”

For Philosophy 101 (highlights):

• Plato, Theaetetus

• Eric Schwitzbegel, The Weirdness of the World

• Helen De Cruz, Wonderstruck: How Wonder and Awe Shape the Way We Think

• Helen De Cruz, ed., Philosophy Illustrated: Forty-Two Thought Experiments to Broaden Your Mind

• Mary Midgley, “Philosophical plumbing”

• Correspondence between Elisabeth of Bohemia and Descartes

Agency

• Michael Tomasello, The Evolution of Agency: Behavioral Organization from Lizards to Humans

  • Commentary by Alan C. Love, “Reflections on the study of biological agency and its evolution” in a special issue of Spontaneous Generations on “Levels of biological agency”

  • Mathilde Tahar, “Agency, Inventiveness, and Animal Play: Novel Insights into the Active Role of Organisms in Evolution” in the same special issue

• Daniel Dennett, Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting

• Matt King and Joshua May, eds., Agency in Mental Disorder: Philosophical Dimensions

• Jenann Ismael, How Physics Makes Us Free

• Michael Bratman, Structures of Agency: Essays

• Several papers by Elijah Millgram

  • “On being bored out of your mind”

  • “Segmented agency”

  • “Bounded agency”

• C. Thi Nguyen, “Value capture”

• Eddie Keming Chen and Daniel Rubio, “Evil and the quantum multiverse”

• Hans van Hateren, “Minimal agency”

• Peter Godfrey-Smith, Complexity and the Function of Mind in Nature (partially read)

Animals

• Peter Alagona, The Accidental Ecosystem: People and Wildlife in American Cities

• Mary Roach, Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law

• Claudia Hogg-Blake, “Loving somebody: accounting for human-animal love”

• Erik Nelson, “Kantian animal moral psychology: Empirical markers for animal morality”

• Lorini, G., Grasso, D., & Loi, A., “Are ants not only ‘social insects’, but also ‘nomic insects’? In search of clues of normativity in the ant world”

• F. Puls et al., “Steps into a Small World: First glimpses on everyday moment-to-moment decision making in an ecologically meaningful multi-choice system for assessing animal preferences”

• Podcast: Meghan Barrett on challenging our assumptions about insects (80,000 Hours Podcast)

• A Dystopian Effort Is Underway in the Pacific Northwest to Pick Ecological Winners and Losers (Avram Hiller, Jay Odenbaugh, and Yasha Rowher, NYT)

  • Also listen to Jay on WBUR

  • Also read Avram’s substack post at Philosophy Happens

Misc

• Aesthetic value and the practice of aesthetic valuing (Nick Riggle, Philosophical Review)

• Genetic reproductive freedom (Richard Y Chappell, Good Thoughts)

• Philosophers should blog (Richard Y Chappell, Good Thoughts)

• Killers of the Flower Moon: A consequentialist movie review! (Avram Hiller, Philosophy Happens)

  • I’m not sure I agree with Avram’s take but I enjoyed reading it and liked the movie a lot (maybe more than Avram and probably for the reasons that make him like it less). I say that without prejudice to my consequentialist leanings.

• Moral progress is annoying (Evan Westra and Daniel Kelly, Aeon)

  • Interesting theory of why changes in social norms often rub us the wrong way.

    • See commentary by Eric Schliesser

    • and by Paul Bloom

      • Westra and Kelly’s response

        • Bloom’s response to their response

Leisure

Novels

• George Orwell, 1984

• Elizabeth Taylor, At Mrs Lippincote’s

• Elizabeth Taylor, The Soul of Kindness

• Lauren Groff, The Vaster Wilds

• Honoré de Balzac, Illusions perdues

• Honoré de Balzac, Père Goriot

• Started recently: Jane Austen, Emma

Nonfiction

• Katie Arnold, Running Home: A Memoir

• Started recently: James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed

  • It took me a while to tackle Scott, even though his work had long been recommended to me. His recent passing was, as is often the case, a pretext to fill the gap. I’m starting with his classic, Seeing Like a State, the core thesis of which is that states need, promote, and enforce legibility, which has numerous advantages (for the state and certain social groups) but also major costs. It simplifies and thwarts organic processes that draw on autonomous agency and local knowledge. I’m only 20% in but it’s even more enjoyable and a work of genius than I suspected. Every single page bubbles with insights. Genius.

  • Pairs nicely with 1984.

Misc

• Let’s face it, morality sucks, much philosophizing about it is cope (Helen De Cruz, Wondering Freely)

  • Moving reflections on her own mortality and a justified dig at philosophers.

• A pianist who’s not afraid to improvise on Mozart (on Robert Levin) (NYT)

• The loneliness of the low-ranking tennis player (Conor Niland, The Guardian)

• How crossing American streets became impossible and Top 10 Strava airport segments (Sam Robinson, Footnotes)

• How should the world deal with cyclists who don’t stop at red lights (Jonny Long, Escape Collective)

  • Interesting data, sensible thoughts, though I take issue with the overwhelmingly positive characterization of the changes in Paris. Restructuring the city to accommodate cycling and reduce pollution? Yes, please! Enabling cyclists to behave like jerks and endanger pedestrians at every single crosswalk? No, thank you. I was in Paris last summer and more than once I was nearly hit by cyclists who refused to give way. It’s their space, theirs first, and only theirs, they seem to think.

• NOFX farewell tour in The New York Times!

• Learning to live with fear (on Alex Honnold) (NYT)

• Kilian Jornet’s (the GOAT) Alpine Connections project:

  • Strava writeup and data

  • Kilian Jornet Foundation

  • NNormal

  • iRunFar

• Big Milk has taken over American schools (Kenny Torella, Vox, part of the generally excellent Future Perfect series)

  • As Torella notes, this began 80 years ago. Dairy is one the greatest scams of the century—an environmental disaster and a mass purveyor of animal cruelty whose health benefits are at best substitutable, at worst very dubious.

• The political economy of anti-price-gouging (Cyril Hédoin, The Archimedean Point)

  • On some bad policy proposals from Harris

I’ll make up for the obnoxious formalism with cheesiness. What a wonderful world! We wonder at its weirdness and try to explain it. But also embrace the weirdness as a source of wonder for its own sake. Maybe the weirdness of the world doesn’t need to be explained away; explaining the world need not eliminate its weirdness or wonderfulness. Isn’t it weird that the relations between twelve arbitrary (and historically unstable) frequencies, their associated pitches (the twelve-tone chromatic scale), and their conventional arrangements (major, minor, and pentatonic scales, and other modes) generate some of the most incredible aesthetic and spiritual experiences?And that’s just the most common, not a unique way to carve out the sonic world in beauty-generating units! I mean, even Hanon can sound great:

How many possible worlds can you imagine where human beings never figured that out, let alone excelled at it, or where our auditory perception simply didn’t allow for such experiences? I can imagine a few and they all suck. Isn’t it wonderful that we happen to live in a world where that plus all the other things happen? Maybe what we need to jettison are the expectations that lead us to be bothered, rather than amazed, by weirdness.

Wonder is instrumental in discovery; it prompts us to better understand nature by uncovering its laws (or compiling the patterns and structures that underlie the fact that the world can make sense to us if you’re a Humean about the laws of nature). Wonder and its cognates—awe, admiration, amazement, puzzlement, surprise, curiosity—are also intrinsically valuable. The emotions of wonder and awe contribute to a flourishing life. A life devoid of such attitudes is bereft of intellectual thrill, antithetical to the childlike approach that many of us want to hold onto.

In what I want to believe is a wonderful coincidence, two philosophy books recently published by what is becoming my favorite academic publisher, Princeton University Press, adopt the childlike approach that motivates so much of art, religion, science, and philosophy. They are The Weirdness of the World by Eric Schwitzgebel and Wonderstruck: How Wonder & Awe Shape the Way We Think by Helen De Cruz (they both have great Substacks). I plan to incorporate a chapter from each book into my Intro to Philosophy (PHIL 101) this fall.

Aristotle famously wrote that philosophy begins in wonder, and De Cruz rightly makes much of this. Wonder was not just at its origins. It is at the beginning of every philosophical inquiry.

Human beings began to do philosophy even as they do now, because of wonder, at first because they wondered about the strange things right in front of them, and then later, advancing little by little, because they came to find greater things puzzling (Metaphysics 982b12).

The world is puzzling and strange and thus exerts pressure on our understanding, prompting us to interrogate it and do philosophy, which then and now also encompasses or spurs some important scientific questions. Just in case you’re feeling good about yourself today: Aristotle wrote some of the earliest and most important treatises in what was not yet physics, cosmology, biology (“natural history”), psychology, and political science, no less. Alexander the Great—legend has it—took time during his conquests to collect foreign animal specimens to bring back to his teacher, Aristotle. This was just a fraction of the hundreds of species that Aristotle examined, dissected, and classified, most of which were marine creatures, while wondering at their complexity and variety. Admittedly, he made some mistakes, such as calling the octopus “stupid”.

In her recent book, Justice for Animals, Martha Nussbaum builds her case upon the virtue of wonder, one of the virtues (alongside awe and compassion) that can take animals as its objects and, she argues, ground their recognition as subjects of justice. In this she is expanding on a point she already made in Frontiers of Justice back in 2006, where she wrote:

The capabilities approach judges instead, with the biologist Aristotle, that there is something wonderful and wonder-inspiring in all the complex forms of life in nature. In The Parts of Animals, Aristotle gives his students a lecture on why they should not “make a sour face” at the idea of studying animals, including the ones that seem not very exalted. … All animals are objects of wonder for the person who is interested in understanding. (p. 347-8)

And she goes on to quote Aristotle (p. 348):

We won’t leave out any of them if we can help it, whether more exalted or less exalted. For even in the case of those animals that give no delight to our senses, nature the artificer provides countless pleasures to those who can study the causes of things and who have a philosophical spirit … So we should not embark on the study of the less exalted animals with a childish disgust: for in everything in nature there is something wonder-inspiring. There is a story that some visitors once wanted to meet Heraclitus, and when they came in they found him warming himself in the kitchen. He told them, “Come in, don’t shrink back. There are gods here too.” So too, we should approach the study of each type of animal, not making a sour face, knowing that in every one of them is something natural and wonderful. (Parts of Animals 645a26–27)

In previous posts, I have tried to show that animals other than the usual suspects are amazing—absurd to us in some respect and yet sources of meaning and amazement.

Philosophy and biology, broadly construed, build off an initial sense of wonder. But the point is more general. It is often said that most of the natural sciences started in earnest when they branched off from philosophy—think of Galileo and Newton as natural philosophers, Adam Smith as philosopher and economist, William James as philosopher and psychologist (no, I’m not saying these guys literally invented those fields). Or Descartes’s contributions to mathematics and optics. Or Leibniz the polymath, who co-invented calculus (also credited to Newton) but also argued that the fundamental building blocks of reality are mind-like simple substances called “monads”. They are all featured in De Cruz’s Wonderstruck. The sciences inherit from philosophy its reflexive disposition to wonder—wonder how, wonder why, wonder at. Wonder and awe, De Cruz argues, are pretty much universal among human beings. They are manifested in distinctive but fundamentally common ways in the sciences, the arts, religion, and philosophy. There is admittedly a tension between science and wonder, or so we are sometimes told, following Max Weber—science promotes a “disenchanted” view of the world and is antithetical to the kind of wonder that religion and magic cultivate. But De Cruz dispels this myth that science and wonder are antithetical—in fact, Weber himself believed that disenchantment did not preclude re-enchantment. (I do not know my Weber well enough to tell whether he thought modern science would eventually undermine WWW in the scientific realm, if not in other domains.)

Weirdness is inescapable, argues Schwitzgebel (“Universal Dubiety” thesis), whenever we try to make sense of minds (are snails or the United States conscious?), knowledge (do we live in a dream or simulation?), and the fundamental structure of the world (quantum indeterminacy, superposition, entanglement, many-worlds, etc.). But weirdness arouses childlike wonder, an attitude we should cultivate, not only because it’s so much fun but because it leads to important insights, as Schwitzgebel muses near the end of his book.

To take one central source of weirdness, physics is indeed weird, and physicists don’t shy away from it, though some will minimize the weirdness and tell you to deal with it (the “Shut up and calculate” attitude allegedly promoted by the so-called “Copenhagen interpretation” of quantum mechanics, a misnomer for Niels Bohr’s camp). General relativity, quantum mechanics, black holes, and the Big Bang are all difficult to comprehend, and counterintuitive. Our evolved psychology, trained over millions of years to the macroscopic world in which things move at small scales and low velocities (compared to astronomical scales and the speed of light) is a poor match for the fundamental laws of the universe. And yet these are as mainstream and empirically successful theories as you’re going to get. If physics is weird but, by and large (if defeasibly and incompletely) correct about the laws of nature, then it seems we are forced to accept the weirdness of nature. Embrace it might be too much to ask: shutting up and calculating does not so much evoke enthusiastic study as blind obedience. Still, from weirdness you cannot conclude that anything is wrong, whether it leads you to keep probing (Einstein) or to move on (Bohr). The problem is not the world, it is—unfortunately but inevitably—you—until you stop seeing this as a problem but instead take it as a source of wonder. Einstein thought some implications of quantum mechanics were not just weird but problematic, but that doesn’t mean the problem was to be explained away; he just thought the theory must be incomplete. Whether or not he was right about that, the weirdness did arouse fundamental inquiry and some kind of wonder. Namely, going beyond simply calculating—not that there’s anything wrong with that.

What could be more suspicious than a world the scientific understanding of which perfectly lines up with our naive expectations? What an amazing coincidence that would be, a source of wonder on its own matched only by the serendipitous publication of these two books! Indeed, let me posit that such a coincidence would be even weirder—and much harder to explain scientifically—than whatever weirdness physics tells you is the case. To now make up for all the cheesiness, let me obnoxiously call this the Weirdness is Normal (WIN) conjecture. Since any formalism in this post is completely superfluous, that’s the last you’ll hear of this conjecture.

Science and philosophy are fun and all that, but they’re not all that important. And so I’m going to leave you with a truly bizarre and equally wonderful moment of music, an endless source of wonder if there ever was one. While music does not feature prominently in Wonderstruck, it is definitely in the background. De Cruz plays the lute and is especially interested in Renaissance and Baroque music. Watch her play Chaconne la comète, by Jacques de Gallot (1625-1695), a “musical rendition of the sighting of an unusually bright comet that passed across Europe and other parts of the world in the winter of 1680” at the link below:

New Work in Philosophy

Helen De Cruz (St. Louis University), "Wonderstruck: How Wonder and Awe Shape the Way We Think"

Does science nurture or dispel our sense of wonder? By Helen De Cruz The piece that I play in the linked video is Chaconne la comète, by the French lute composer Jacques de Gallot (1625-1695). It is a musical rendition of the sighting of an unusually bright comet that passed across Europe and other parts of the world in the winter of 1680. This was Kirch…

Listen now

2 years ago · 14 likes · Marcus Arvan

The moment I want to focus on is, you guessed it, from Mozart (sorry, y’all Mozart-haters will have to either unsubscribe or shut up and listen!). In the last movement of his Symphony No. 40 in G minor, K. 550, Mozart inserts what the conductor (and host of the marvelous Sticky Notes podcast) Joshua Weilerstein has dubbed “the most extraordinary moment of the piece” and “the classical music version of covfefe” in his episode on this symphony (he also has a mini-episode specifically dedicated to this moment but it’s restricted to Patreon supporters so I won’t share it). The moment comes in the last movement, after the repeat of the exposition. Here’s a video detailing the moment:

Weilerstein comments:

After that expression of unbridled joy, Mozart stops in his tracks, and writes the most harmonically adventurous music he would ever write in his huge output of music. In fact, in that passage, Mozart gives us 11 out of the 12 notes of the scale. The only one he avoids is a G - the home key of the movement. The G minor horse we’ve been riding has just thrown us off and has run off with all of tonality. Around 140 years later, Arnold Schoenberg would catch up to that horse, take its ideas, and usher in a new era of music when he took the central idea of this moment, a loss of tonal grounding and security, and spun it into a whole style of music, called 12 tone music. …

What this moment of craziness allows Mozart to do is to create an incredible sequence of harmonic changes.  But unlike the changes in the first movement, which were based on the motive almost exclusively, this time Mozart uses his opening motive of the last movement and adds to it the main idea of those extraordinarily strange measures of the beginning of the development. …

And Mozart isn't done - remember that in the first and second movements, his developments were surprisingly short, and the movements were incredibly compact. In this last movement though, Mozart pulls out all the stops.

This moment doesn’t shock the modern ear, because we are now more accustomed to dissonance and atonality. And because it is one of Mozart’s most famous and beloved symphonies, it has just become familiar (though I suspect most people are familiar with the first movement and might overlook this wild allegro). But it is truly bizarre and out of its time. It is unexpected. Its role isn’t obvious. It’s also wonderful.

It’s one of Mozart’s weirdest moments but by no means the only one—Mozart gets the unfair reputation of being easy and repetitive, which only people who have never really listened can actually believe. And remember that in his final year, Mozart composed a pretty strange but of course widely admired opera titled The Magic Flute (Die Zauberflöte), K. 620. Setting aside the Masonic influence, the opera is often taken to also reflect the influence of the Enlightenment and its triumph over obscurantism. Hardly a condemnation of disenchanting science, you might think. But magic pervades the opera, it is not restricted to the dark forces of the Queen of the Night or more sunny forces of the high priest Sarastro. The opera contains many magical moments, but one of my favorites (and this is going to be cheesy) is the famous Papageno-Pamina duet in the finale, where the two lovers—astonished to see each other—engage in charming bird-like courting (“Pa-pa-pa”) (see an interesting note on the origins of the duet here; also, it bears some similarity to a Salieri opera).1 Now, I don’t believe in magic, but if anything ever comes close to making me doubt, Mozart will be one of the reasons.

Enjoy and wonder away!

Contents

• Physics

• Philosophy

• Animals

• Music

• Running

• Podcasts

• Films

Physics-adjacent

• Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb

  • A classic that I’d meant to read for a while. Magisterial. It will take you a while to go through but it will never feel too long. I watched Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer shortly after finishing it; it pairs well. I am looking forward to reading the sequel, Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb

• Annie Jacobsen, Nuclear War: A Scenario

  • I had read many rave reviews. It is actually quite bad.

• Benjamín Labatut, When We Cease to Understand the World

  • I had also read stellar reviews but was not disappointed. I am looking forward to reading The Maniac

• William Egginton, The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality

  • The title says it all. The style is, literally, not my style. It is nonetheless enjoyable and compelling. Not by a philosopher or physicist, yet the treatment of Kant and Heisenberg is solid.

• Claudia de Rham, The Beauty of Falling: A Life in Pursuit of Gravity

  • General relativity, memoir, and cutting-edge research on ‘glight’ (gravitational waves) and massive gravity intertwined. A page turner you wouldn’t expect.

  • Also listen to her interview on the Mindscape podcast

• Jim Ottaviani and Leland Myrick, Feynman

  • A graphic novel on the life of Richard Feynman. I didn’t love it, but Feynman had an interesting life and the book is entertaining and evocative.

Philosophy (and other nonfiction)

• Cameron Buckner, From Deep Learning to Rational Machines: What the History of Philosophy Can Teach Us about the Future of Artificial Intelligence

  • Just started. The empirical discussion of deep learning models is technical but it is promising. I like how Buckner blends the history of philosophy and recent developments in AI.

• Sabrina Little, The Examined Run: Why Good People Make Better Runners

  • Sabrina is the only professional runner I’m aware of who has also become a professional philosopher.

  • The book is more about virtue and life as a runner, and the interaction between a good life and good running, than it is about the philosophy of running.

  • This is a very good book—lucidly written, amusing, engaging, original, practical, and genuinely philosophical.

  • An excerpt

• Toby Ord, The Precipice

  • Read in the context of my Effective Altruism class. I loved it! It appeared before MacAskill’s What We Owe the Future. They are in fact two very different books. I recommend them both. Neither has persuaded me of longtermism, but they are nothing like the caricatures of the movement you’ll read online.

• Cal Newport, Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World

  • Not philosophy but it didn’t fit anywhere else.

  • Surprisingly good ‘self-help’ book. I was already on the precipice, but it further convinced me to phase out my dependence on social media and my phone. It’s a long process, but I’m not regretting any of it.

  • Related: philosophers Tim Aylsworth and Clinton Castro on the Kantian duty (to ourselves) to become digital minimalists (open access); also see their previous work

• One of the great philosophers, Daniel Dennett, died on April 19 at the age of 82

  • Many ‘remembrances’ by philosophers were shamelessly narcissistic, so I won’t share them here.

  • Good obituary by science journalist Jennifer Ouelette (who happens to be Carroll’s wife)

  • Eric Schwitzgebel on Dennett and interpretation of your and others’ work

  • Some interesting comments by the philosopher of physics David Wallace

  • I listened to this interview of Dennett by Sean Carroll, recorded in 2019, just days before his death was announced: Dennett on minds, patterns, and the scientific image

  • I just started reading one of his classics, Elbow Room (1984), which is excellent from the first page. Dennett was 42 when it came out. This was already his fourth book (one of them co-authored with Douglas Hofstadter), on top of many already-then influential articles. Incredible.

• Effective altruism

  • The political philosopher Leif Wenar was largely praised by philosophers and others for writing what amounts to a misleading and uncharitable takedown of EA in WIRED

  • The excellent Richard Yetter-Chappell responded to Wenar and elaborates on the idea of ‘moral misdirection’

  • What ‘effective’ altruism means to Richard

  • Richard’s reflections on Peter Singer (on the occasion of his farewell conference)

  • The equally excellent Richard Pettigrew also responded to Wenar

  • Helen de Cruz lampoons EA in the style of Pascal’s Provincial Letters

    • I disagree with the intended message of the pastiche but it is well done

• Do we overoptimize?

  • Helen De Cruz on playing Super Mario with your grandkids and case for ethical egoism (I’m not sure this is an apt name for the view)

  • Sabrina Little on the “optimization craze” in running and its conflict with the good life (iRunFar)

  • Not philosophy but on topic: Freddie de Boer on the curse of overoptimization

• Misc from Substack

  • Robert Long’s Experience Machines

    • How not to ‘debunk’ AI sentience

    • A nice double shout-out to Running Ideas in the spring links

  • Dan Williams (Conspicuous Cognition) continues his empirically informed critique of misinformation and disinformation alarmism:

    • Is it dangerous?

    • A reading list

    • Debunking disinformation myths, part 1

    • Debunking disinformation myths, part 2

  • Justin Smith-Ruiu against “euthanasia”

  • Paul Bloom on toddlers’ tantrums

  • Another valuable Childhood and education roundup by Zvi Mowshowitz

    • I don’t agree with everything Zvi writes, some of it I sometimes strongly disagree with, but I always enjoy reading him and I’m just amazed at how much information he digests; if you want to know anything about recent developments at OpenAI, new model releases, AI safety, and other related matters, look no further.

  • Misha Valdman is wondering whether Parfit could make you eat shit (on Parfit’s Repugnant Conclusion and Moore’s Open-Question Argument)

  • Kieran Setiya, “Learning how to die” (on standup comedy)

Animals

• Michael Tomasello, The Evolution of Agency: Behavioral Organization from Lizards to Humans

  • Long overdue reading. Excellent—especially the core thesis that agency is psychological organization, from robots to lizards, from squirrels to apes—with two caveats:

    • This is a very Tomasello-like book—it is ultimately about how human beings are a different kind of animal due to shared intentionality

    • Relatedly, the story, tracing the origins of human agency, feels overly teleological—and for that reason, mammalian-centric.

  • To Tomasello’s credit, he has a very permissive account of agency that applies all the way ‘back’ to reptiles and that presumably also applies other vertebrates including fish and birds, and some invertebrates (especially cephalopods but maybe arthropods as well).

And then, three loosely related books on ‘liminal’ animals:

• Bethany Brookshire, Pests: How Humans Create Animal Villains

  • Informative and fun. A bit repetitive when it comes to how we “create animal villains” but she’s on the right side and makes a case that I hope will persuade many readers that ‘pest’ is in the eye of the beholder and more often than not a result of avoidable human miscalculations.

• Peter Alagona, The Accidental Ecosystem: People and Wildlife in American Cities

  • Just started. Promising.

• Mary Roach, Fuzz: When Animals Break the Law

  • Likewise.

Music

• Norman Lebrecht, Why Mahler?: How One Man and Ten Symphonies Changed Our World

  • Do not buy, borrow, gift, or read this book. Indeed, avoid Lebrecht if you can. You are blessed if you have managed to avoid him so far.

• Patrick Mackie, Mozart in Motion: His Work and His World in Pieces

  • Started. The style is too flowery for me, but I don’t mind reading someone who appears to love Mozart as much as I do

  • Don’t miss my Mozart series:

• From Substack

  • Evan Goldfine, Where to start with Bach

  • Ethan Iverson’s farewell to the legendary Maurizio Pollini (RIP)

  • Justin Smith-Ruiu, Country music in a fractured country

  • Brad Skow on playing music loud (and together)

  • An amazing 1944 solo by Dizzy Gillespie (Playback with Lewis Porter!)

• Sticky Notes podcast

  • Mozart, Piano Concerto in D Minor, K. 466

  • What is a mode? (in post-Renaissance classical music)

  • Brahms, Piano Concerto No. 1

Running

• I recently finished the Cruel Jewel 100 (actually 104 miles) after a few weeks of nagging inner knee pain (probably the so-called “runner’s knee”), and Joe Uhan’s excellent advice on running an ultra after an injury gave me confidence in both taking time off and running the damn race. This is me ‘running’ the race (credit: Emily Cameron, IG @ecam44):

• Eliud Kipchoge’s Faith Endures Hardest Test (Run by Outside)

• The keys to Courtney Dawalter’s continued dominance (Run by Outside)

• What Jade Belzberg learned after ten years of running ultras

• Robbie Harms on teachers in ultrarunning (iRunFar)

• Katie Arnold on writing and running (iRunFar)

• Documentaries on two of the very best ultrarunners of the last ten years!

  • Walmsley | The Film. A very endearing look into Jim Walmsley’s rocky but ultimately successful quest to become the first American man to win UTMB

  • François d’Haene : Le chemin du retour. D’Haene’s return to racing.

Podcasts

• Mindscape

  • Stefanos Geroulanos on the invention of prehistory

  • Sahar Heydari Fard on complexity, justice, and social dynamics

  • Matt Strassler on relativity, fields, and the language of reality

• 80,000 Hours

  • Lewis Bollard on the 7 most promising ways to end factory farming, and whether AI is going to be good or bad for animals

  • Zwi Mowshowitz on sleeping on sleeper agents, and the biggest AI updates since ChatGPT

  • Randy Nesse on why evolution left us so vulnerable to depression and anxiety

• Conversations with Tyler

  • A disappointing (to me) season so far (too much religion, techno-optimism). In addition to Suzuki and McKenzie, mentioned in my previous roundup, I’ve enjoyed Michael Nielsen on collaboration, quantum computing, and civilization’s fragility

• Very Bad Wizards

  • On culture and agriculture

  • On elephants

  • On kidney donations and EA (with Vlad Chituc)

• Sentientism podcast

  • David Peña-Guzman on being ‘species diplomats’

• Knowing Animals

  • Angie Pepper on killing animals in shelters

    • The edited volume that Angie co-edited, including a chapter of mine

  • Andrew Lopez on animals and epistemic injustice

    • Andrew’s paper (open access)

Good films I recently watched and recommend

• Heavy

  • Dunkirk (Christopher Nolan, 2017)

  • Oppenheimer (Christopher Nolan, 2023)

  • Anatomy of a Fall (Anatomie d’une chute) (Justine Triet, 2023)

  • Sibyl (Justine Triet, 2019)

• Light

  • Polite Society (Nida Manzoor, 2023)

  • Troop Zero (Bert & Bertie, 2019): a feel-good movie that was enjoyable to watch with the kids

• Documentaries

  • The Booksellers (D.W. Young, 2019)

  • Cat Daddies (Mye Hoang, 2022)

  • Meru (Jimmy Chin, Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, 2015)

That’s it, folks! Expect less frequent posting in the next two months. Happy summer!