New Advance article at HPLA: Joerg Alejandro Tellkamp, Francisco de Vitoria on Knowing the Just Causes for War
This is part of the forthcoming special issue "New Social Perspectives in Medieval Philosophy", ed. J. Pelletier & A. M. Mora-Marquez.
AN AUTISTIC URBAN HERMIT
(you may not understand if you are not autistic)
For many years, I've been a very curious person. I've learned many things and done many things that I found interesting: science, art, computer science. Like a voracious animal, my mind has consumed all kinds of information, eager to understand everything around me and everything I experienced. Soldier, doctor, monk, musician, hacker, etc. Until one day, staring at the ceiling in the bed of a psychiatric hospital where I was hospitalized, I asked myself: "How did I get here, to this?" And that night, 17 years ago, another part of my life began. I began to die and be reborn, to discover how and why I had gotten to that situation. I discovered that I have high abilities, that I am bipolar and autistic. But for every limitation I discovered, I also discovered the limitations of the world and the human society in which I live.
Today I know that nothing has meaning and that life doesn't need to have it; that what many see as progress and evolution, I see as barbarism and brutality, and that humanity is the stupidest species on the planet, not the best. I don't have goals anymore, I don't need them. But I do have a compass, a kind of direction without needing to get anywhere. To live as peacefully as possible and need very little, being aware and critical of everything. A peaceful dwelling isn't just my house tucked away in the middle of the city, but also a peaceful inner life, without the noise and clamor of the lives of "normal people," without socializing more than the bare minimum necessary for survival. And this isn't because of autism; it's because of a kind of purge, a psycho-spiritual hygiene. The forced social being I often was is dying. Until a few years ago, there wasn't so much exposure and socialization; it wasn't mandatory or essential to living and working in this world. With all the technology and supposed progress, there is increasing misery, hunger, war, and violence everywhere, which makes me think that it's more of a trigger than a solution.
Being overly intelligent and being autistic is a fatal combination that guarantees the death of the social being and the development of the inner hermit that every gifted autistic person potentially is. I'm slowly retreating from the world to my quiet inner abode, where a very narrow door filters who enters and who doesn't. Just my small family group and a minimum of kindness toward a few people is more than enough.
I thought a lot about sharing what I'd learned, about helping, but I realized that idealism and the romanticization of compassion are useless when the sufferer doesn't understand the root of their problems and isn't willing to do their part. Human nature is to be a soulless son of a bitch, held back only by fear of punishment, whether from human law itself or some imagined deity. It's better to live in full awareness of the suchness of things. I myself can be a compassionate genius and in the next moment break your head for being rude and treating me badly.
We live in the worst of all possible worlds, and with that, we are warned that the worst can always happen. Knowing that, any good thing that comes or appears is a gift, a bonus track.
I don't give unsolicited advice, but if you want some, it's this: "Step away from the world as it is and watch it burn from a distance."
(An autistic person becoming an urban hermit.)
#actuallyautistic #autism #autistic #gifted #giftedness #zen #society #humanity #hermit #philosophy
I cannot think of an applied mathematics that is more beautiful and far-reaching, or philosophically wilder, than probability. No, nonlinear dynamics and chaos people, it’s not even close 
#probability
#mathematics
#appliedmathematics
#philosophy
#philosophyofscience
@philosophy@newsmast.community
@philosophy@a.gup.pe
#Neulateinische Neuerscheinung: Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni, Brian P. Copenhaver, und Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. Nine Hundred Conclusions. I Tatti Renaissance Library, ITRL 100. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2025.
THE IMPLICATIONS OF "QUEER"
I have been catching up on the reading of my former (queer) professor and I am happy to find he has continued in being the queer pioneer he always was.
We are used, if we know anything about "queer", to the slogan "queer means attack". But what is it queer attacks? The essay I read suggests it is "identity". Yes, that's right, in a world chock full of people who want to make the (sometimes essentialising) claim that they simply "are" things, all kinds of queer people and theorists claim that "queer" is that which attacks the very notion of "identity" and destabilises the intellectual ground on which "identity" can seem convincing.
I am going to write a book next called "Sexual Autonomy". In brief, it is a book about how sexual autonomy is at the heart of political freedom and is, in fact, a necessary component of it. I think the queer insight I just mentioned here is part of that. For we cannot be free if we lock ourselves up in incarcerating notions about sex.
For example, some people think there are things called "gay sex" and "heterosexual sex". These exist based on the idea that there are definitive "men" and definitive "women". The intellectual position "queer" says no to this. It says these identifications are rhetoric not fact, fiction (which is and can be for purposes) and not inherent reality. Queer says knowledge, all knowledge, is a tool of power and made up to get somewhere rather than reflecting an idealistically conjured "reality". Nature does not distinguish between "gay sex" and "heterosexual sex". There is just sex. Nature does not distinguish between "man" and "woman". There are just humans. Nature does not distinguish between reproductive or recreational sex. There is just sex.
So what queer says here is "Ask yourself what people are doing with their words and why they imagine the world in one way and not another." There are not only two types of anything (and these two types are not opposites either). Queer, if it is anything, is (expanding) diversity. It (I hope) makes you think.
#queer #lgbtq #lgbtqia #trans #transgender #nonbinary #gay #lesbian #women #philosophy #anthropology #bi #pansexual #writing #queerwriters #queertheory #anarchy
Mens sana in corpore sano
Juvénal, poète romain de la fin du 1er siècle après JC
tags : un esprit sain dans un corps sain, gym tonc, #sport #philosophy #cats #caturday #photography
What is the characteristic wrong of testimonial injustice?
Richard Pettigrew, 2025
"When someone is in a position of power over you, you often need them to have accurate beliefs that only your testimony can reliably supply"
https://academic.oup.com/pq/advance-article/doi/10.1093/pq/pqaf034/8104779
'In my view, to fixate on words misses much of what translation is.'
Michelle Chan Schmidt talks to Matt Reeck about his philosophy of #translation
Just don't call it a #philosophy
#books #reading #writing #fiction #poetry #publishing #bookstodon @bookstodon
Latest papers: Johannes Solzbacher, Peter Koenig & Sven Walter argue that Approach Avoidance Bias is indeed embodied, but that a proper understanding of the way it is embodied arguably has to incorporate central cognitivist insights https://doi.org/10.1080/09515089.2025.2466646 @psychology #philosophy
"Not many people think of themselves as half-beasts trapped in human guise, but there’s an echo of the animal in everyone. A beast we each have to struggle with, large or small, trapped and subdued by a maze of modern life," writes writer, illustrator and researcher Natalie Lawrence in her new book, "Enchanted Creatures: Our Monsters and Their Meanings." Here's an extract, reproduced in LitHub, where she discusses bullfights, Picasso, and the story of the Minotaur.
Hannah Arendt on “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship”.
Worth taking the time to read and re-read.
Insight after insight, page after page.
About Germany ~1933 - ~1963 but speaking to us now, decades later.
Via @interfluidity and @resnikoff
#Philosophy #PoliticalScience #Sociology #Humanities #History #Fascism #Antifa #FarRight #Germany #Deutschland
Can you think of an emotion or mental state where somome will tend to avoid pleasure? Is there such thing as a kind of ascetic drive?
I'm thinking there is something missing where you have emotions that drive one both away from (e.g. fear, lain) and toward (e.g. anger) negative stimuli but I van only thing kf emotions or mental states that drive us towards positive stmuli (e.g. desire). Maybe satiation counts? What else could?
#philosophy #philosophyofmind #psychology
@psychology @philosophy
Latest papers: Francesco Marchi argues that the mainstream doxastic view in the self-deception literature, namely motivationalism, presupposes a Cartesian theory of belief acquisition in this open access article https://doi.org/10.1080/09515089.2025.2452392 @psychology #philosophy
What's the Difference? Philosophy: 150 Key Concepts in Philosophy by Adam Ferner, 2025
What’s the difference between sarcasm and irony? Or nihilism and fatalism? Or sex and gender?This book is part of a new series and a brand-new approach to popular reference based on the question, ‘What’s the difference?’.Inside, there are crystal-clear explanations of 150 paired words that build into a wide-ranging philosophy primer.
"Our feelings of helplessness stem from the fact that for thirty years the tools of persuasion and coercion have been mobilized to wage an ideological war for capitalism, rather than to create conditions for capitalism to remain viable." -David Graeber
#Propaganda #Socialism #Inequality #Philosophy #DavidGraeber
"The American Federalists were being quite realistic when they argued that democracy is inconsistent with society based on inequalities of wealth since, in order to protect wealth, one needs an apparatus of coercion to keep down the very "mob" that democracy would empower." - David Graeber
