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Reader's Digest: July 19, 2025
An article in the Smithsonian Magazine brings word of a 7th great extinction, not as terrifying as the 6th, but not on that account negligible; in it…
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Kieran Setiya
3
Horse Whispering
I confess that, when I allow myself to think about it, I am amazed that I understand so little about what it is we philosophers do.
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Kieran Setiya
6
Reader's Digest, July 5, 2025
In the last NYRB, Kwame Anthony Appiah reviewed two recent books about translation. One is by Damion Searls, whose Tractatus I criticized in this space…
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Kieran Setiya
1

June 2025

Font of Wisdom, Font of Truth
I became a Baskerville convert in 2012, the year film-maker Errol Morris ran an uncontrolled experiment in The New York Times. By his arrangement, an…
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Kieran Setiya
3
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
25
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

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