Writing

A close reading of Marx and Engels’s The German Ideology, arguing their conception of ideology is a structural critique of inverted consciousness, and defending that reading against the genetic fallacy objection.

Why Kant needs Genius to explain how beautiful art can exist without rules, and where his account still leaves the authority of Genius unexplained.

Putnam’s objection to Smart’s identity theory, working through what an octopus in pain does to a purely physicalist account of mental states.

A case for linguistic nativism built on Chomsky’s Poverty of the Stimulus argument, tested against behaviourism and against what LLMs seem to show about learning grammar from exposure alone.

Why Keith Lehrer’s fourth condition for knowledge doesn’t survive Randolph Carter’s entomologist counterexample, and asks too much of the knower where it does hold.

My Extended Essay on how adequate Plato’s account of the good life really is, read against Martha Nussbaum’s critique in The Fragility of Goodness.

A source-based dossier on the status of gambling in Rome, from a Pompeian tavern mural to Cicero’s speeches against Catiline and Mark Antony, in the original Latin.

A source-based dossier on how tyrants and tyranny were actually received in Archaic and Classical Athens, working through Plato, Aristotle, Xenophon, Herodotus and Thucydides in the original Greek.