Year in Review 2022

Yes, alright, I’m being lazy, but I haven’t had time to finish a column during the winter break, and I thought I would substitute by looking back at my writing over the past year. Unless you are a completist, you should find something new by me in the list below.

In January, I wrote about David Chalmers and the ethics of virtual worlds: “If I sincerely thought what he does and I wrote a book about it, my goal would be to stem the tide of technological progress before it goes too far.”

In March, I decoded Wittgenstein’s private notebooks, newly translated by Marjorie Perloff, and wrote about the personal and philosophical: “Philosophers are an astonishing, flawed, obsessive bunch. We have something to learn—about them, and about their philosophy—from figuring out what makes them who they are.”

In June, I raised doubts about Buddhism as self-help, quoting William Godwin: “What magic is there in the pronoun ‘my,’ to overturn the decisions of everlasting truth?”

In August, I wrote about philo…