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Brad Weslake
@bweslake.org
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Associate Professor of Philosophy, NYU Shanghai • https://bweslake.org/
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Brad Weslake @bweslake.org · Feb 26
For example, a debate occurred during the sixteenth century concerning the treatment of the leaves and pine needles fallen over bridges, paths, and stepping-stones. The most noted sixteenth-century tea master, SEN Rikyū, preferred the natural atmosphere of the fallen leaves and pine needles. Some of his disciples, however, thought it best to clear the path or stepping stones.
bweslake.org
Guess who wrote this, more than 10 years prior to Churchland's “Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional Attitudes”.
There is an important respect in which Armstrong's analogy between materialism and the equation of the gene and the DNA molecule fails. Pre-molecular genetics was an exact scientific theory: the concept of the gene was introduced in the service of scientific explanation, and subsequent work in molecular biology which makes the equation plausible has had the same aim. But the psychology of common sense, embodied in the ordinary concepts of belief, desire, sensation, perception, emotion, and so forth is not a scientific theory. The mental states for which Armstrong offers causal analyses are picked out by a system which has evolved naturally, and whose form may depend significantly on its extra-scientific functions. Our dealings with and declarations to one another require a specialized vocabulary, and although it serves us moderately well in ordinary life, its narrowness and inadequacy as a psychological theory become evident when we attempt to apply it in the formulation of general descriptions of human behavior or in the explanation of abnormal mental conditions. The crude and incomplete causal theory embodied in common-sense pyschology should not be expected to survive the next hundred years of central nervous system studies intact. It would be surprising if concepts like belief and desire found correspondents in a neurophysiological theory, considering how limited their explanatory and predictive power is, even for gross behavior. The physical behavior which, on Armstrong's analysis, a given intention is apt to cause, may be the product of causes whose complexity cannot be brought into even rough correspondence with the simple elements of a present-day psychological explanation.
November 17, 2025 at 2:45 PM
bweslake.org
A perfect table of contents.
1 Happiness 1 2 Death 61 3 The Remainder of Life 106
October 7, 2025 at 3:34 AM
bweslake.org
Mirror: A film by Andrei Tarkovsky
September 30, 2025 at 1:56 AM
bweslake.org
James Scott.
The historiography of class struggle, one might add, has been systematically distorted in a state-centered direction. Everyday resistance does not throw up the manifestos, demonstrations, or pitched battles that normally compel attention. It makes no headlines. But just as millions of anthozoan polyps create, willy-nilly, a coral reef, so do thousands of individual acts of insubordination and evasion create a political and economic barrier reef of their own. There is rarely any dramatic confrontation, any movement that is particularly newsworthy. And whenever, to pursue the simile, the ship of state runs aground on such a reef, attention is typically directed to the ship-wreck (for example, a fiscal crisis) itself and not to the vast aggregation of petty acts that made it possible. It is seldom that the perpetrators seek to call attention to themselves. Their safety lies in anonymity. It is also extremely rare that officials of the state wish to publicize the insubordination. To do so would be openly to confess that their policy is unpopular and, above all, to expose the tenuousness of their authority in the countryside. Thus, the nature of the acts themselves and the self-interested muteness of the antagonists conspire to create a complicitous silence that is reflected in the historical record. In this context, the events that claim most attention are typically those to which the state and ruling classes accord most space in their archives. Thus, for example, a small and futile rebellion claims an attention that is often all out of proportion to its impact on class relations while unheralded acts of flight, sabotage, and theft that may be of greater long-run significance are rarely noticed.
September 27, 2025 at 7:31 AM
Reposted by Brad Weslake
liamsims.bsky.social
A stunningly beautiful initial depicting a dying man in bed with his soul being taken up by an angel. From a copy of Aristotle’s De Anima, likely copied at Oxford c. 1260. @theulspeccoll.bsky.social since 1715, MS Ee.2.31.
September 26, 2025 at 6:50 PM
bweslake.org
Christopher Walken.
Did you go back and study “Severance” before filming season 2? I don’t have technology. I only have a satellite dish on my house. So I’ve seen “Severance” on DVDs that they’re good enough to send me. I don’t have a cellphone. I’ve never emailed or, what do you call it, Twittered. Does it make you feel a bit alien in a world where everyone is attached to their phones? Not really. I’ve never had a watch either. But if I need the time, I just ask somebody. Likewise, once in a while when I need to use a phone, I just ask if I can borrow one.
February 1, 2025 at 3:42 PM
bweslake.org
150 years ago you could get random observations of your baby published in Mind. Indisputably the most famous person to ever publish there—guess who!
No. 7. JULY, 1877. MIND A QUARTERLY REVIEW OF PSYCHOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY. I.-A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF AN INFANT.
January 31, 2025 at 8:53 PM
bweslake.org
Unless your multiverse has endless hells lurking in the triangular gaps between worlds, I don't buy it.
Surrounding the great, circular ocean is a ring of mountains known as Cakravāla (also Cakravāḍa), which forms the external boundary of the world. The disk-shaped earth that supports all these oceans, continents, and mountains floats atop decreasingly substantial layers of fundamental elements (earth, water, sometimes fire, and wind) that ultimately float in the void of space. Most traditions acknowledge a multiplicity of such single world-systems (loka-dhātu), often abutting one another horizontally and sometimes also layered vertically. Groups of thousands, millions, and billions of such worlds play important roles in metaphors for vastness and innumerability. When described in such collections, each world typically has the same basic geographical features, including its own Sumeru, four major continents, great ocean, and so on, making this a generic model for all worlds in Buddhist cosmology. In other cases, however, alternative worlds are described with quite different landscapes to emphasize specific contrasts with this world (see the section “Mahāyāna and East Asia”). Within each single world-system that follows the generic pattern, there are also numerous heavens and hells above and below the relatively flat surface of the world. While the heavens generally rise directly above Sumeru, the hells may descend—depending on the tradition—centrally below Sumeru, peripherally below southern Jambudvīpa, broadly filling all of the elemental layers below the entire cosmos, or even externally in the deltoid interstices between adjacent discoid worlds. Based on these layers above and below the surface of the earth, many cosmological systems also propose vertical divisions of space, most commonly distinguishing the more-or-less geographical realm of the earth, hells, and lower heavens (kāma-dhātu, realm of desire) from more ethereal realms of form (rūpa-dhātu) and formlessness (ārūpya-dhātu) above.
January 3, 2025 at 5:55 PM
bweslake.org
Regret calibration.
A menu box allowing you to “Undo send” at timescales of 0, 5, 10 or 20 seconds.
December 28, 2024 at 4:50 AM
bweslake.org
Very sad to learn today that Yanyou—the founder of Jiazazhi, the Chinese photo book publisher and bookstore—was arrested in June and is still being held. There is a small note about it in this AP story. #china
As China cracks down on bookstores at home, Chinese-language booksellers are flourishing overseas | The Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) — Yu Miao smiles as he stands among the 10,000 books crowded on rows of bamboo shelves in his newly reopened bookstore. It’s in
www.ap.org
December 23, 2024 at 9:17 PM
bweslake.org
The magic spell hypothesis: just as magic spells are written distinctively to make them appear special, so legal language is made complex in order to signal a special kind of authority. See: doi.org/10.1073/pnas...
December 21, 2024 at 4:00 PM
Reposted by Brad Weslake
noamchompers.bsky.social
why would you use chatgpt to simulate an endless tedious argument with various professional philosophers when we already have the daily nous comment section?
December 20, 2024 at 1:14 PM
bweslake.org
Shibata Zeshin, Monkey Posing as a Collector, 1835. Justin Sun posing with Maurizio Cattelan, Comedian, 2019.
Shibata Zeshin, Monkey Posing as a Collector, 1835. Justin Sun posing with Maurizio Cattelan, Comedian, 2019.
December 19, 2024 at 10:36 PM
bweslake.org
Two excellent new articles on the cultural wasteland produced by corporate streaming— @tavlin.bsky.social on Netflix: www.nplusonemag.com/issue-49/ess... and @lizpelly.bsky.social on Spotify: harpers.org/archive/2025...
December 19, 2024 at 7:40 PM
Reposted by Brad Weslake
modalizing.bsky.social
An 18-chapter volume on Levels of Explanation, co-edited with Katie Robertson. It's out in hardback on 31 Dec, but it's also open access and the PDF is already free to download:
global.oup.com/academic/pro...
December 18, 2024 at 10:46 AM
bweslake.org
“a labourer working to put down lasting foundations in the midst of the waves” —Proust on memory of music.
December 18, 2024 at 6:55 AM
bweslake.org
Prediction: the only good consequence of generative AI will be improved public understanding of cryptographic methods to prove authenticity.
December 17, 2024 at 7:48 PM
bweslake.org
Pascal Quignard, The Roving Shadows.
The earth has been turning for 3,500 million years. Humanity has lived for one million years. The history of human civilizations has lasted for 10,000 years, without being either continuous or evolutionary. The civilized, artistic, noetic, literary part is only an imperceptible fraction of the species Homo. Imperceptible by the species itself, as a general rule. There have been only a few works, a few objects, a few sounds, a few books, a few walls glimpsed by a few human beings who, from time to time, bow reverentially to them.
December 17, 2024 at 2:05 PM
bweslake.org
Analia Saban, Perceptron, 2024.
Analia Saban, Perceptron, 2024.
December 14, 2024 at 9:04 PM
bweslake.org
Shanghai at night. Photo taken from the International Space Station, 27 March 2012.
Photograph of Shanghai at night, taken by a crew member on the International Space Station, 27 March 2012.
December 10, 2024 at 7:29 PM
bweslake.org
Wonderful article on Zabihollah Mansouri, the prolific Iranian writer who simply made up much of what he “translated“. His Persian rendition of Lolita is twice as long as the original; his The Three Musketeers is ten times as long! See: yalereview.org/article/amir...
There is, though, a catch. I have been referring to Mansouri as a “translator.” But by contemporary standards, the most popular translator in the history of Iran translated hardly anything at all. Most of his works are a hodgepodge of source text mixed with his own additions and musings, which he offered so generously as to sometimes overwhelm the original. In some cases, the author of the book Mansouri was supposedly translating didn’t even exist. He would write something of his own, then make up a French name and publish his work under the fictive author’s byline. Many would say that one of the most popular literary figures of twentieth-century Iran was a full-blown charlatan.
December 10, 2024 at 5:10 PM
bweslake.org
We should also arrest everyone else who gave five stars to a Dan Ariely book.
December 9, 2024 at 7:20 PM
bweslake.org
A story about a story to tell, next time you teach Descartes.
The mechanical daughter of rene descartes: the origin and history of an intellectual fable Minsoo Kang History Department, University of Missouri–Saint Louis E-mail: kangmi@umsl.edu This article pursues the origin and mutation of a fantastic story concerning an automaton in the shape of a young girl that was supposedly built by Rene Descartes. In recent decades it has been retold and reimagined so many times that the tale has become an iconic narrative in the context of the reassessment of Descartes’s significance in intellectual history. But a close reading of the original story, found in a 1699 work entitled Melanges d’histoire et de litterature by Vigneul-Marville, reveals an overtly stated agenda of saving the philosopher’s moral reputation, which makes most recent interpretations of the story problematic. The vast majority of modern retellings demonstrate no awareness of the content or the significance of the first tale even as it has been used to shed light on Descartes, Cartesian ideas, and early modern thought in general. I A fantastic story concerning Rene Descartes relates how the philosopher once built an automaton in the shape of a young girl and took it aboard a ship. When the captain of the vessel found it, he became terrified by its mechanical movements and threw it overboard.
December 8, 2024 at 6:27 PM
Reposted by Brad Weslake
genesegrill.bsky.social
Musil To R.Lejeune: "From this awareness that you're looking out for me so much, along with the Wotrubas' warmth flowing into me, so that the art does not go cold...I borrow the recklessness I need to keep building a house of cards, while the earth collapses under it. (November 1939)
December 8, 2024 at 3:10 PM