Featured Essays
Key Themes
History of Intelligence
AI sets in motion a new chapter in the history of intelligence’s confrontation with fate and necessity. Telling the stories of its twists and turns will broaden our upstanding of what intelligence has been and can be.
Computational Power
These essays examine how digital systems reshape experience, agency, and the unfolding of time. This is not a moral complaint; it is an examination of possibilities.
Rejuvenation
Modernity is not defined by the loss of meaning, but by the expansion of human self-assertion—the long effort of our genus to shape contingency, redirect fate, and assume responsibility for outcomes once attributed to nature or the gods.
Purpose, Attention, Discernment
Purpose is unavoidable. It is the water in which we swim. But when purpose hardens into inflexible ends, it risks tyranny. Drawing on Nietzsche and Bataille, this essay explores how discernment keeps purpose open—how freedom must be renewed within the eternal return of time.
His Name is John
A reading of Luke’s account of the naming of John the Baptist.
Reading the Iliad: Mênis and the Moral Compass
Descending into Achilles passive mēnis in the Iliad leads to a better understanding of the birth of our democratic moral compass.
Reading Zarathustra: The Three Metamorphoses
The three metamorphoses Zarathustra describes in his first speech after the prologue moves us beyond any knee-jerk philosophical and religious musings of ‘being and becoming’. The vision presented here is far more sophisticated.
Reading Zarathustra: The Speeches of Zarathustra
The second installment of my series of Reading Zarathustra. This focuses on the problem of teaching, discipleship, truth telling, and companionship in ‘The Speeches of Zarathustra’ from Book I.
Reading Zarathustra: Prologue
The first in a commentary series on Thus Spoke Zarathustra. This post covers Zarathustra’s Prologue.
Time Out of Joint
How do we compose time?
At the Edge of le Grand Récit
An essay exploring Michel Serres’s engagement with Le Grand Récit and what narrative uncertainty means for ethical life in a world of multiplicity and contingent connection.
L’Incandescent – Serres on Emergence, Light, and Moral Attention
An essay exploring Michel Serres’s concept of the incandescent — where light, unpredictability, and moral attention emerge at thresholds beyond calculation and control.
