New Venture

For any followers unaware, I have started a new venture: personal philosophical consulting and education.  As the opportunities of the job market shrink during my search--not only the quantity of available jobs, but the strictures, and the worries about an unconventional candidate--it became increasingly clear that the traditional academic path was not one that I …

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The Narrowness of Academic Journals

Today, I received a rejection notice from a journal to which I had recently submitted.  In itself, this does not bother me--frankly, after a few years on the job market, I am almost numb to rejection.  Unlike the job market, however, journals tend to give at least some justification, however slight, for rejecting a submission. …

Human Nature and Human Technology

We, in the present, are in some sense both our past and our future.  What we have done and what has been done to us contributes to who we are; and what we intend to do, what we are ordered towards doing, instantiates within us anticipatory relations and dispositions.  We resolve--without reducing--past and future into …

Interpretation & Traditions: A Sample

The below are introductory remarks to a presentation given on Friday, 27 April 2018, for Center for Thomistic Studies Colloquium at the University of St. Thomas, Houston TX.  An audio recording will be posted in the near future.  I also intend revisions, at some point, for publication. --- Preface [For those of you who don’t …

Being-in, In-Human

I wrote a piece on the phenomenology of place--colored by lenses of sin and redemption--and what it means to be in one.  The full thing is here, but first, a snippet: Who is not, from one hour to the next, one day to another, beset by worry about being in the right place at the …

In Protest of Scientism

Late last night, I saw this article on Quillette.com (a locus for generally "centrist" thought--which tends to mean "Enlightenment-thinking Liberal"--in the current rhetorical revolutionary war), "In Defence of Scientism".   My initial reaction--the article being one that is haughty in the extreme, and full of polysyllabic words used incorrectly in painfully contorted syntax--was one of …

Semiotics and Phenomenology: Preface

Below is the (current draft) preface I wrote for my soon-to-be (please, I hope) accepted Intersection of Semiotics and Phenomenology: Peirce and Heidegger in Dialogue (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter). --- This book presents a complex argument.  It will likely not convince all who read it.  It probably will not even convince many who read it.  But it …

Signs and Culture

Bear with me, audience... I'm working out some ideas. --- Humanity, among all animal species, possesses unique social relations.  That is, while seemingly all highly-developed animals interact socially, only humans interact socio-culturally.  What exactly does this mean, though?  We are all familiar, on some level or another, with the idea of culture, and even with many …

On the Art of Annotation, etc.

I often wonder, when reading, how much work the author put into writing the work.  I know that, in my own book-and-article-writing endeavors, what ends up on the page amounts to less than 1/10th of what I do elsewhere in the process (including all of the editing and revising, which is never less than 2/3rds …

Languages, Translation, and Philosophy

Oftentimes, I go on book-purchasing sprees.  Sometimes this is due to visiting used bookstores in great academic cities.  Others, its due to an influx of cash and dropped prices from my extensive book wishlist on Amazon.  But this week, I spent a painful amount of money (for a po' un[der]employed academic like myself, at least) …