👽 🐖 Graham Borland 🐗 🗻

Distinctly recall a Quentin Blake illustration for this one, too!

Seconded, I adored my Milligan anthology as a kid - definitely remember this from that.

Incredible conversations about #Vwoolf2025 and religion happening this year! including a panel on Sunday (feat. one annoying Irish guy), and a fabulous roundtable on the upcoming Edinburgh UP #Woolf2025 & Religion Handbook.

Really exciting stuff!!!

#VWoolf2025

Reading Virginia Woolf’s 3-page essay ‘Gas’ - one of my favourite pieces of writing in the English language - over and over again, using the excuse that I’m preparing for #Woolf2025.

It would be selfish to keep this dramatic reading of it to myself:

drive.google.com/file/d/1yMBg...

Irrespective of whether you have any investment in (or even any time for), say, theological discourse or the sorts of metaphysical ideas Kripal entertains, the question of how and why they seem “out of place” in the secular university is worth taking very seriously.

In other words, the squeamishness around theology outside of Divinity depts. is a living test case for the sort of foundational questions that rethinking the history of the humanities opens up.

I think scholars like

• Josephson-Storm (looking unflinchingly at the esoteric/religious/etc historical roots of the secular humanities), or

• Kripal (poking at the limits of what the humanities are permitted to think about)

speak to the same tensions found by those working in “theology-and-X”

i was an interloper at a mostly Catholic literature & theology event at the weekend

was really struck by the recurring theme of the tensions that theology attracts within secular fields - & the echoes in recent “secular” rel. studies, raising Qs. around what the humanities are, & are allowed to do

reading H.D.’s description of doing solo séance sessions in lonely moments during World War 2, I can’t help but think of the parallels to AI…

👻 🔮 👀

Fabulous! I’m thinking a bit about ethics and epistemic “limits” in Woolf’s essays at the moment, as well as (separately, for now) the eternal question of how to understand “moments of being” - so this look like it’ll be an interesting read!

No conclusion here other than: if you read enough of his essays, you eventually fall in love with William James.

When you get that intimacy with his work, even his comparatively dry - and occasionally catty! - writing like the Psychology harbours flashes of that depth of spirit which animates him.

James’ critique here is the flipside of his famous argument in The Will to Believe - unfounded beliefs are defensible because we can only pursue the truth via “living hypotheses”.

Ideas that try to *contain* contraction & paradox, relegating them to the edges, halt that pursuit.

The same impulse that rejects ideas which act as rhetorical stopgaps leads James to be profound generous towards risky intellectual or spiritual enterprises.

James here valorises a certain restlessness to thought. He’s deeply suspicious of any satisfying answers reached by logic alone, yet likewise wary of an unreflective empiricism that refuses to think deeply and openly.

James comes at it slightly differently. Spencer’s whole project aims to rationally explain the symmetry between knowable realities disclosed by science & unknowable realities intuited by religion.

For James, this amounts to *explaining them away*: assuming both human mastery & ineffable mystery.

This points to Spencer’s role as an ambivalent cypher for different strains of British thought.

Religious critics attacked his agnosticism - i.e. mechanical metaphysics with “the Unknowable” at its core - as coded materialism, while secular critics read it as coded “mysticism”.

Another interesting aspect is James’ characterisation of Spencerian “awe” at the Unknowable.

Despite James’ reputation for intellectual charity to the point of credulity - and Spencer’s for the dullest, driest sort of materialism - James attacks Spencer as *too sentimental*, for a failure of nerve.

(Spencer’s contemporary neglect is warranted insofar as he’s a piss-poor philosopher, yet it’s difficult to overstate his influence and fame in the late 19th/early 20th century.)

There’s some interesting points about James (unstated) invocation of Spencer.

Today mostly read as a niche historical curiosity or a source of scientific racism, Spencer (though James can’t stand him) here represents a major tendency in contemporary thought, with the stature of an English Hegel.

(James would later formalise this critique of what he calls “intellectualism” in A Pluralistic Universe. There, he explicitly argues that materialism is merely another form of Idealism.)

Both Hegel’s idealist vision of synthesis towards “the Absolute”, and Spencer’s mechanistic reduction down to “the Unknowable” are, for James, the same intellectual vice:

faced with scientific or metaphysical aporia, they invent solutions to satisfy intellectual discomfort.

Screenshot of text from William James’ Principles of Psychology. The text spills over two images. The first begins: What shall we do? Many would find relief at this point in celebrating the mystery of the Unknowable and the “awe” which we should feel at having such a principle to take final charge of our perplexities. Others would rejoice that the finite and separatist view of things with which we started had at last developed its contradictions, and was

continued: …about to lead us dialectically upwards to some 'higher synthesis' in which inconsistencies cease from troubling and logic is at rest. It may be a constitutional infirmity, but I can take no comfort in such devices for making a luxury of intellectual defeat. They are but spiritual chlorotorm. Better live on the ragged edge, better gnaw the file forever!

A striking outburst in William James’ Principals of Psychology.

After outlining the problems with all available solutions to the mind-brain problem, James suddenly attacks both Hegelian dialectics and Herbert Spencer’s agnostic scientism as “spiritual chlorophorm”.

I’d never thought of that actually… 🤔

Sounds like a fabulous paper!

After spending a year and a half proselytising about Jason Josephson-Storm’s The Myth of Disenchantment, the inevitable has finally happened and a friend requested the copy I’d gotten from the library.

At least transferring over all my annotations gives me a fun chance to read it again.

Selfie of a person with long curly brown hair and large gold rimmed glasses wearing a blue wool coat, standing in a large courtyard at Trinity College, Cambridge. In the background is a lawn, with an ornate 17th century fountain prominent. Further in the background are the top of some 15th century buildings, and a facade covered in scaffolding.

I’m in one of the “new“ colleges (Hughes Hall, est. 1895) and my supervisor’s in one of the Old Fancy Ones

so I’ve developed a tradition of taking a selfie in Trinity’s Great Court every time I get feedback on a piece of work, to celebrate not being told that I’m actually an evil fraud

YouTube video by Brendan Graham Dempsey Polymodern Economics: Lene Rachel Andersen

Brendan & I have been having some great conversations with contributors to the first issue of "Metamodern Theory and Praxis." Here’s a fantastic interview with Lene Rachel Andersen about her article on polymodern economics. Check it out! www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBxV...

a REALLY exciting CfP for a conference on the modernist long poem in Northeastern University, London!!!!

(of particular interest to those working on anything Richard Adlington-adjecent!)

Photo of a passage from the preface of Eros the Bittersweet by Anne Carson, which reads: “He has become a philosopher (that is, one whose profession is to delight in understanding) in order to furnish himself with pretexts for running after tops.”

barely a page into rereading Eros the Bittersweet and I’ve already been seen…