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.
Intelligence and the Discovery of Time
The Enlightenment did more than champion reason. It transformed humanity’s experience of time itself. As geology shattered the chronology of Genesis and time expanded in both directions, intelligence became something new: the capacity to orient ourselves toward an open future without relying on inherited certainty. In the age of artificial intelligence, that unfinished project deserves renewed attention.
Cultivating Purpose, Expanding Intelligence, and the Death of God
Intelligence is not a possession but a practice — the evolving human capacity to model the world, anticipate futures, and arrange causes toward chosen ends. From Babylonian astronomers who outmaneuvered the gods to modern theories of mind, this essay explores how our species learned to open time itself to purpose.
Exo-Darwinism and the Compression of Time in Michel Serres’ The Incandescent
Modern technology does more than accelerate life—it reshapes how time itself is experienced. Drawing on Michel Serres’ reflections in The Incandescent, this essay explores how intention, speed, and exo-Darwinism compress the past into background, turning history into a resource rather than a place we still inhabit.
The Highest Poverty - Giorgio Agamben
The monastery perfected the structuring life through the rigorous measurement of time. This went well beyond simply organizing the day. How the monks spent their time became integral to their salvation, and a template for others.
A Tenth of a Second - Jimena Canales
Modernity didn’t just apply technologies of measuring time at more minute levels. Modernity and time measurement are bound together much more intimately.
The Genesis of the Copernican World - Hans Blumenberg
Copernicus did not kick humanity out of the center of the universe. He made the Earth a star and also tried to restore the harmonious relationship between God’s creation and humanity. The consequences for the configuration of time are underappreciated. This book corrects that.
The Time that Remains - Giorgio Agamben
A reading of St. Paul that will change the way you see him. Also a great way to understand Walter Benjamin’s w e a k messianic power.