Wright's Writing

Probably unwisely, I've posted my lifelong intellectual journal online, specifically on Google Books . It's a very long document that no...

…They accuse me -- Me -- the present writer of The present poem -- of -- I know not what -- A tendency to under-rate and scoff At human...

[Old notes.] I’m reading Stanislas Dehaene’s Consciousness and the Brain: Deciphering How the Brain Codes Our Thoughts (2014). Good book,...

[From 2015.] Reading a bunch of articles on cognitive development. A fascinating field. Interesting: Human infants who receive little...

David Graeber died. At 59. Tomorrow, you or I might die. At any moment. Meanwhile, we pretend life has meaning. Eventually, we will die....

Here's the last section of chapter 6 of my dissertation on the unemployed in Chicago during the Depression. The previous two sections are...

The last chapter of my dissertation on the unemployed in Chicago during the Great Depression is, I think, more interesting than the...

[Notes from ten years ago.] I’m amazed at the extent of our culture’s cult of secrecy in matters of the body. Even in this age, people...

Wittgenstein is an odd case. I've always had the impression that his early work, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, is genius—and not...

Many years ago, when I was a simple boy who thought he ought to know a lot about Hegel, I took masses of notes on his philosophy. Below...

Here's the sequel to this post, from the last chapter of my Ph.D. thesis. It's just an excerpt. The main point of it is to argue against...

I'm kind of a "vulgar Marxist." In this respect, I suppose I'm a lot like people in the American ruling class, except that their values...

This student paper, from 2006, argues that knowledge in the strictest sense is impossible. No one ever has “absolute” knowledge,...

[From 2010.] The psychology of sex is fascinating. For example, why are women sometimes attracted to “innocent” young men, “pure,”...

Back in my twenties I had an intellectual and creative energy I don't have anymore. I was consumed by philosophy, jumping from topic to...

Life in the 21st century as we all wait consciously or unconsciously for the apocalypse is boring and driven by distractions, an endless...

Today I came across a copy of Dave Eggers' Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and was reminded of myself in my twenties, when I was...

Sometimes I like to return to philosophy in order to get the sort of intellectual stimulation that reading history doesn't provide. E.g.,...

[From 2009.] I’m reading Thomas Nagel’s famous book The View From Nowhere (1986). Nagel seems more sensible than most contemporary...

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