Toby Chappell

"Yet so long as we live in time, the ghost of the murdered past will always fill the present with a profound uneasiness." - Santayana

I love it when a philosopher goes straight for the throat in the opening sentence: "The main purpose of this paper is to show that there is no such thing possible as an ethical philosophy dogmatically made up in advance." (William James,"The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life")

The audiobook edition of my latest book, _The Languages of Magic_, is out today! Available pretty much anywhere you get your audiobooks.

The Languages of Magic: Transform Reality through Words, Magical Symbols and Sigils, by Toby Chappell This is an unusual book. Toby Chappell, whose background includes academic studies in philosophy and linguistics, introduces arcane ideas fr...

Book review by Dave Lee

The Languages of Magic: Transform Reality through Words, Magical Symbols and Sigils, by Toby Chappell This is an unusual book. Toby Chappell, whose background includes academic studies in philosophy and linguistics, introduces arcane ideas fr...

My review of Toby Chappell's The Languages of Magic, chaotopia-dave.blogspot.com/2025/06/the-...

Men many times fancy that they act from reason when the reasons they attribute to themselves are but excuses which unconscious instinct invents for the teasing 'whys' of the ego. The extent of this self-delusion is such as to render philosophical rationalism a farce. -C.S. Peirce

YouTube video by Hermitix Podcast The Languages of Magic: Linguistics, Lovecraft, and Language Virus with Toby Chappell

Very proud of this interview. Informed by approaches from anthropology, linguistics, and semiotics, my book explores magic as a type of communication. This is why I prefer "semiurgy", as it avoids the baggage that "magic" has accumulated over the years in popular awareness. youtu.be/HzlhRleyUF0

Will you be sharing the paper after? I'm very interested in the topic (and very glad to see Stein gaining more attention)

"When we think, then, we ourselves, as we are at that moment, appear as a sign". - C.S. Peirce

Ran across this in Cambridge (MA) today. This could get interesting... 1970s Russia had some unique takes on both semiotics and linguistics

That's awesome! I started reading Stein recently (only The Problem of Empathy so far) and really resonate with her approach and conclusions. Finding others to talk about her work with has not been easy, but it seems she is beginning to gain wider recognition which she very much deserves

Can I be added please?

Changing Reality Through Magic Words, Sigils & Symbols YouTube video by Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio

Had a great conversation with the hosts of Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio last week, talking about my new book on linguistics, semiotics, and ancient+modern magic (link for book in bio). www.youtube.com/live/CCSknVM...

#linguistics #semiotics #semiurgy

How have you defied the meaninglessness of the universe today?

Release day is finally here! 📖 Do you have your copy of _The Languages of Magic_ yet? Available from all the usual suspects, both online and brick-and-mortar... (the benefits of having a very widely distributed publisher!) 📚

One of the defining sicknesses of our current age is that we compulsively consume -- both media and materia -- without even being fully present in the act of consumption itself

Precisely. They are designed solely as recombination machines; their rigid inbuilt goal is to produce cohesive structure, not coherent truth

One of the defining sicknesses of our current age is that we compulsively consume -- both media and materia -- without even being fully present in the act of consumption itself

In my forthcoming book _The Languages of Magic_, I expand on Austin's "performative utterances" and Wittgenstein's "language games"-- both are critical to semiurgy as we affect reality through words and the actions they carry/embody. Link in profile.

Thanks also to @carlabrahamsson.bsky.social for the excellent blurb. Yours ended up on the back cover!

The Languages of Magic A guide to magic as communicationDrawing on linguistics and semiotics, practicing magician Toby Chappell explores how we perceive and affect the world by treating it like a partner in communication. H...

More information at www.innertraditions.com/the-language...

So these showed up today... April 8 is the official release date. Preorder wherever you buy your books, or directly from Inner Traditions (mainstream brick&mortar bookstore chains should have it in stock too after release, if that's your jam)

(Seriously, if you know a Fichte scholar send them my way. A Levinas scholar too for that matter. UGA has neither unfortunately, but like every other philosophy dept at least we've got that one dependable hardcore Hegel prof; I think that's required for accreditation)

When you start to really get the philosophical rabbit holes you've committed to digging into.... Others would say they'd really like to talk to a therapist right now; I say things like "I really wish I had a Fichte scholar to bounce this off of right now." 😂

The trees that forcefully soar end up burned by lightning, chopped down, or uprooted. Returned to the ground, they come back up in another form. (Battaile)

Interesting how many questions from the audience latched onto the brief mention of mysticism from the text.

Great talk at UGA today from philosopher @philosophermoss.bsky.social ! I had already read the piece he shared (prologue to the Priest/Gabriel book "Everything and Nothing"), but the comments and discussion after opened some new angles of understanding for it.

If it was some bug in the phonetic model that crossed those up, it would be showing up in lots of other weird places too. IMO has to be something the model learned from word proximity (which means the model worked 😂)

Must be a thing with languages beginning with 'r'... Ruby has some bafflingly arbitrary design choices too (in many cases doing something solely to be different from other languages, like using 'elsif' instead of 'elseif' or 'elif')

Baudrillard's "semiurgy" recognizes that ones who create the signs also create the lens that is always between perceptions and their underlying reality. I explore the implications of this in my new book _The Languages of Magic_, coming April 8. Link in profile.