Soon after I wrote my last post on “why I’m done with the publishing industry for my fiction”, I came across a perfect example of the mass confusion that resides in the world of the arts. I just had to share it and analyze it. It’s the essay, “Analyst or Moralist?” by James Jackson, which was published in Quillette in mid-May.   Firstly, so we can know where this is coming from, James Jackson’s bio for the article says he is “a writer and academic interested in culture, the arts, and politics. He is currently completing a monograph on the French poet, playwright, and filmmaker ..read more

It's time to focus on my craft. Almost seven years ago, I started submitting my novel The Vitanauts to different literary agents and publishers. I’ve come painfully close to getting it published a few times, but it never actually happened for me. And after the latest near miss that took up a huge amount of time and energy, I’ve come to the realization that I need to stop waiting around for permission from others to get my ideas out there.   (For fellow writers who take solace or lessons from these trials, see Footnote 1 for a rundown of my efforts.)   Look, don’t get me wrong ..read more

What an intriguing book title! Who isn’t looking for more purpose in their life, and longing to be part of a strong community? The needs for these are pretty much human universals and it’s hard to imagine having too much of them, so I expect this title will speak to you at least a little. It sure did to me. So, I thought I’d share a bit about it. First, though, a little context.   For a little over two years, I’ve been heavily involved with an online community run by the non-profit organization ProSocial World. That’s where I led the creation and day-to-day running of ..read more

​Hi all! I'm pleased to announce a new publication that has just been released. In the latest issue of Skeptic magazine, I have a piece co-authored with Zafir Ivanov. Zafir participates in the Evolutionary Philosophy Circle with me and during our last generation of activity talking about mental immunity, he proposed that we work on something together. The result, after a few months of hard work, is the article below. The final version is behind a paywall for subscribers to Skeptic, but this draft copy is close enough. Enjoy! And let me know in the comments ..read more

The Evolutionary Philosophy Circle I’ve started with David Sloan Wilson’s ProSocial World is just about to start our fourth “generation” of activity (which is sort of like a semester), so I wanted to finish recapping what we’ve done so far. As I said in the last two posts, we first took a whirlwind tour of the different branches of philosophy in generation 1 to see how the theory of evolution affects them all. Then, in generation 2, we took a look at another holistic worldview (Ken Wilber’s Integral Philosophy) to see how it differs from the worldview we are ..read more

Is there a reason why academic philosophers don't take Ken Wilber seriously? In my last post, I described the Evolutionary Philosophy Circle I've been running at ProSocial World and I shared a summary of the first generation of activity we undertook. For those first steps, we conducted a brief survey showing how a deep consideration of evolution affects every branch of philosophy. And since I have argued elsewhere that one way to define a worldview is as the sum of one's beliefs across all the branches of philosophy, it follows from this that adopting an evolutionary phil ..read more

Generation 1 — How Evolution Impacts Different Branches of Philosophy ​I’ve mentioned in quite a few different posts now that I’ve been working to create an Evolutionary Philosophy Circle (EPC) on a platform that has been built by ProSocial World. PW is an NGO that was co-founded by the evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson who is famous for championing the idea of group selection, so in keeping with that, this PW platform gives tools to groups to help them cooperate better and make meaningful change in the world. One of the common ways these groups act is via 12-week “sprint sessio ..read more

Hi all — it's been a while since I've been able to regularly post to this blog, but it's time to get back into the swing of things. I've missed it! Back in March of 2022, I announced that I was going to be starting an Evolutionary Philosophy Circle with David Sloan Wilson's non-profit group called Prosocial World. Then, in August of 2022, I mentioned that I was moving to Vienna with my wife who had received a job with the United Nations. Those have both gone very well and I'm settling into a good groove now but these things sure have kept me super busy. Especially since we've had over 20 vis ..read more

Hi all, and Happy New Year! It's been several months since I've managed to post anything on my website, but that's only because I've been far too busy with life and other outlets for my writing. I mentioned in my last post about the Vienna Circle that my wife and I were planning to move to Vienna and that has gone off without a hitch. After 10 weeks here, we're fairly settled and I can hopefully get back to regular writing activities again soon. I've been doing a lot with my Evolutionary Philosophy Circle that's being run in David Sloan Wilson's Prosocial World, and I'll have a lot more to sa ..read more

Over the last few blog posts, I introduced a new Evolutionary Philosophy Circle that I have been co-founding, which was built using the theory of the Prosocial method. I wrote about how that project was going in practice, and then shared the first talk I gave to that group, which showed how evolutionary metaphysics can deeply alter all other branches of philosophy. The organisation of this new group was deeply influenced by the fact that just before I was recruited to work on it I happened to have read David Edmond's fantastic book The Murder of Professor Schlick: The Rise ..read more