Josie Major

What makes us human ( ningen ) is not the ontological structure made by the first principle or divine transcendence. Nor is it reason, spirit, nor even the metaethical structure of meaning that provides a theoretical ground for our ethical values, but rather the ‘concrete practice of betweenness’ or ‘in-betweenness of act connections’ that... See more

I just had tea with someone – a writer whose book I’d written about and who reached out and wanted to connect – and that hour-long conversation gave me a dozen ideas to think about, to learn about, and thus to write about (including two books I already ordered based on our chat). Is that “research” in the sense that one deliberately sets out to... See more

Yet surely having something wrapped right around your mind is different from having your mind wrapped tightly around something. What we live in is not the age of the extended mind but the age of the inverted self.

In medieval Latin, a florilegium (plural florilegia ) was a compilation of excerpts or sententia from other writings and is an offshoot of the commonplacing tradition. The word is from the Latin flos (flower) and legere (to gather): literally a gathering of flowers, or collection of fine extracts from the body of a larger work. It was adapted from... See more

Plato was a firm believer in the notion of inexact cycles of history, which he thought were closely connected with astral events such as the conjunctions of planets. Believing that circles were perfect emblems of the divine, he argued that every process would eventually return to its starting point. History would cycle through golden ages and... See more