In Michael Cohen’s Foreword to his memoir Disloyal, written from U.S. federal prison, he identifies himself as President Donald Trump’s “former personal attorney, confidant, consigliore, and, at least in my heart, adopted son.” He confesses that he “had frequently been the one screaming threats on his behalf as Trump’s fixer and designated thug.” He admits to having “stiffed contractors on his behalf, ripped off his business partners, lied to his wife Melania to hide his sexual infidelities, and bullied and screamed at anyone who threatened Trump’s path to power.” He, like many other supporters, had once been “an acolyte obsessed…

A Harvard first-year undergraduate wakes up on an empty campus. The buildings are dark. He believes he’s late for class, but soon he gets the idea that time may have passed, or unpassed, in an abnormal way. There are no humans, and plant and animal wildlife has already begun to retake the city. Traversing Mass Ave is still a bit of a challenge, as it is in real life, but in entirely new ways.

This is the opening of Gene Doucette’s The Apocalypse Seven. The book is named for the survivors of the fictional humanity-ending event: Touré, Robbie, Carol, Paul…

My reflections on Why Fish Don’t Exist by Lulu Miller.

The Biographical Subject of ‘Why Fish Don’t Exist’

David Starr Jordan (1851–1931) collected fish specimens. Initially he caught them himself, but on an 1880 trip he used “intimidation tactics to force Chinese and Chinese-American fishermen to fork over their best catches,” Miller writes. Collecting fish gave him “that impossibly intoxicating feeling. That sweet honey on the tongue. That hit of fantasized omnipotence. That lovely sensation of order.” He suffered the loss of a young wife and two children. …

Why should we assume, with Socrates, that it is useful or even possible to give one single account of the many instances of knowledge? Why should we expect that each instance of knowledge is a branch off the main tree of Knowledge? What if, instead, each instance of knowledge is loosely bound to others by a Wittgensteinian “family resemblance”?

Epistemology

The study of the definition and meaning of knowledge has, since Socrates, been known as epistemology. And the project of epistemology, as traditionally conceived, is too restrictive. It is restrictive in at least three ways.

First, it tries to make a…

Andrew Sullivan headlined his April 9, 2021 article on Substack: “A Truce Proposal In The Trans Wars”. As if living as a trans person is like taking a side in Star Wars. As if trans people want to be in a war rather than just have their gender. And as if the solution, when enemies attack your right to exist, is to propose a truce. He subtitled it: “There is a compromise available. Here’s one version.” The purpose of his article is to propose how he, a cis man, would compromise away trans people’s rights. He seems to think that…

In April 2021, a humanist organization revoked an award it had given to the prominent atheist Richard Dawkins 25 years earlier. The reason — at least, the immediate one that prompted their final call — was that Dawkins had made an offensive comment online.

I heard from some people who say they do not understand why Dawkins’ comment was offensive or harmful. It was indeed offensive and harmful, and it is important that this be made clear, so I have written this article to explain it from my perspective.

From What Perspective Is This Written?

I am a transgender man over 40. I have been living…

A tweet by the famous biologist and atheist Richard Dawkins on April 10, 2021 made headlines for its comparison between the identity claims of transgender people and those of Rachel Dolezal.

Because some people are not aware of the details of the 2015 scandal in which Dolezal was outed, specifically in the discourse that tried to make an analogy with transgender identity, I will revisit those details here as background information. Then, in my next article, I go on to discuss the controversy over Richard Dawkins’ comments.

The Dolezal Scandal in 2015

Rachel Dolezal is a white American woman who posed as Black. She attended…

Steven Connor’s The Madness of Knowledge: On Wisdom, Ignorance and Fantasies of Knowing (2019) proposes a new word for the feeling of knowing. Here are some insights from the introduction to the book.

A relatively recent word: ‘Epistemology’

Though the question of knowledge itself goes back at least to ancient Greek philosophy, the word to describe that intellectual concern is a relatively recent arrival to English. Ralph Cudworth’s treatise (written c. 1688, published 1731) suggested the related word “epistemonical, meaning something like ‘capable of being known’.” In Connor’s interpretation, a word like “epistemonical” begins to gesture toward our fantasy that something’s existence depends on our…