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Under the Net

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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
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
7
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
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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
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
Take me out with the crowd
The philosopher Joseph S. Ullian died late last year. He is probably best-known for an introduction to epistemology co-authored with W. V. Quine, that…
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Kieran Setiya
1
Reader's Digest: March 22, 2025
A coda to my post about Christian Wiman on despair: his book led me to the poetry of William Bronk, a metaphysian whose primary claim to fame is that he…
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Kieran Setiya
1
Keep Your Mind in Hell
In a recent TLS, I wrote about the spoils of pessimism—whether we should be quietists, retreating from the world, or activists who fight for it—but my…
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Kieran Setiya
7
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Under the Net
Philosophy as a Guide to Life

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