Wright's Writing

[Excerpts from this book. See also this blog post, "Excerpts on happiness."] The meaning of life?— Life is not totally “meaningless.”...

Over the years I've written a lot of reflections on the metaphysical issue of scientific realism vs. anti-realism or idealism. Idealism...

I recently read a great book called A New History of Life: The Radical New Discoveries about the History of Life on Earth. Couldn't...

Here's a list of some good leftist books I've come across over the years. Click on the titles for the PDFs. It's a somewhat arbitrary...

[Here's an excerpt from a book on 'humanism' I wanted to write back in 2006. It's from a passage in which I was arguing against...

[Old notes on David Montgomery’s great book Citizen Worker: The Experience of Workers in the United States with Democracy and the Free...

With regard to the period between the 1530s and 1640s, the great Marxian historian Steve Stern divides the economic system that prevailed...

[Philosophical notes from 2005.] Reading a collection called Contemporary Debates in Epistemology (eds. Steup and Sosa) for class. I'm...

The profundity of language.— You can gain great insight into the human condition, into the nature of the mind, by studying the evolution...

Here are old notes of mine on a very good book by the historian Roger Horowitz, “Negro and White, Unite and Fight!”: A Social History of...

In The Populist Vision, Charles Postel argues persuasively that Populism, the greatest popular movement in American history, should not...

August, 2007.— Here’s one of the many parallels between Marxism and 'Meadism' [i.e., George Herbert Mead's system of thought]: “Human...

[Notes from 2006.] Reading The Alchemist, the novel that has sold tens of millions of copies. “To realize one’s destiny is a person’s...

Questions Raised by 9/11, and Their Answers [An old grad-school paper] Lawrence Wright’s book The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to...

[Grad-school notes...] I'm reading about John Brown--David Reynolds' John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the...

[As an undergraduate at Wesleyan University I wrote hundreds of essays not all of which, I think, are worthless. Here's a short one on...

[The following thoughts are from this book.] It’s funny that people often deprecate Marxian materialism as an explanation of society and...

[From 2008. Copied here, somewhat irrelevantly, in recognition of the recent suicides that have been in the news.] Read an article in...

Here are some old disjointed notes on a classic book by the psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott. I happen to be skeptical of psychoanalysis,...

Phenomenological explorations of consciousness and the self have always fascinated me, and over the years I've taken reams of notes on...