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Reader's Digest: June 21, 2025
A recent essay by Raymond Guess connects Alasdair MacIntyre with the social history of analytic philosophy. Geuss is a brilliant writer and as trenchant…
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Kieran Setiya
5
Errata
It is now a more or less biennial event: a professional philosopher, employed in an Anglophone philosophy department, publishes a book denouncing…
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Kieran Setiya
21
Proximity
Let’s start with points of convergence. Like Jonathan Kramnick, John Guillory posits close reading as a skill or technê, a form of acquired know-how or…
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Kieran Setiya
3

May 2025

Alasdair MacIntyre (1929-2025)
Alasdair MacIntyre died this month. I never met him and I know only a fraction of his work; but I admire what I have read. That includes After Virtue…
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Kieran Setiya
8
Selected Amazon Reviews
Let us celebrate one of the great social and technical breakthroughs of the 2010s: the invention of the “Bic for Her,” a biro so ergonomic even the wife…
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Kieran Setiya
1
Negative Space
According to his student, Norman Malcom, “Wittgenstein once said that a serious and good philosophical work could be written that would consist entirely…
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Kieran Setiya
6
Who wants to live forever?
I made a joke, last year, about philosophy’s failure as a pedagogy of death: if it was meant to teach me how to reconcile with mortality, it doesn’t…
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Kieran Setiya
27

April 2025

Reader's Digest: April 26, 2025
There’s an informative, well-written piece by Zoe Guttenplan, on the NYRB website, about the New York City subway map.
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Kieran Setiya
The Delivery: ★★★★★
A nameless delivery boy in a nameless city, a refugee from a nameless country, fleeing a nameless Strongman, indentured to a nameless Supervisor…
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Kieran Setiya
Reader's Digest: April 12, 2025
You wait ages for an essay about Johannes Kepler’s 1634 Somnium, and then two come along at once…
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Kieran Setiya
5
Snookered
"If this all sounds feasible, or even fun, then I’m afraid my description has been misleading." The description in question is by Sally Rooney, in an…
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Kieran Setiya
4

March 2025

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