Philosophics (@microglyphics) Bsky

Nihilism Is Not a Symptom How a discipline attempts to psychologise and pathologise the world

In this Substack, I reveal the sleight of hand psychologists use to domesticate ideas from philosophy and other disciplines by critiquing an essay on nihilism and Anhedonia.
open.substack.com/pub/brywilli...
#Nihilism #Psychology #Philosophy #blog #podcast #essay #reading #writing #pathology

2 days ago 2 0 1 0

I saw your link to the article. This is why I published the Substack article in response. Thanks!

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Nihilism Is Not a Symptom How a discipline attempts to psychologise and pathologise the world

I comment on how this article makes conflations all too common for the discipline of psychology.
open.substack.com/pub/brywilli...

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This appears to be evidence of how psychology ruins philosophy by conflating concepts. smfh

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Everything Must Go… But Not Quite That Much

James Ladyman and I agree that language is a fundamental impediment to understanding – and this includes notions of reality.
open.substack.com/pub/brywilli...
#philosophy #blog #podcast #language #science #reality #perception #metaphysics #physics #ontology #realism #epistemology #books

3 days ago 5 0 0 0

An interaction in Chapter 2 of Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day inspired me to write a #Substack article on #metaphors we may not consider to be metaphors. I focus on #professionalism and #honour.
open.substack.com/pub/brywilli...
#philosophy #language #books #reading #writing #blog #podcast

4 days ago 4 0 0 0

Double Coincidence of Wants Why Dating Is Not Shopping, No Matter How Many Apps Insist Otherwise Firstly, be nice, and remember that I’m a recovering economist, so I can’t fully abandon this lens. There’s a …

🥰 Ever the romantic, I look under the covers at the calculus of matchmaking. It should be no surprise to most that dating is not an economic endeavour.

philosophics.blog/2026/04/16/d...

#philosophy #economics #psychology #efficiency #dating #evaluation #romance #preferences #blog #podcast

5 days ago 0 0 0 0

Rival Moral Approaches of the Modern World – Alasdair Macintyre Alasdair MacIntyre is persuasive when he argues that moral discourse is never neutral, and that modern liberalism smuggles in substantive standards while pretending not to. But he dismisses emotivi…

A follower asked me to comment on a Philosophize This! segment on a couple of books he published after After Virtue, and so I did.
philosophics.blog/2026/04/15/r...
#pilodsophy #psychology #critique #blog #video #podcast #society #culture #morality #ethics #books

6 days ago 3 0 0 0

The Butler Did It (To Himself) I have just started reading Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, and I must confess that I can’t read like a normal person. I made it roughly fifteen pages before the analytical len…

I read the opening chapter of Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day through the lens of A Language Insufficiency Hypothesis.

philosophics.blog/2026/04/14/t...

#philosophy #literature #language #grammar #aesthetics #beauty #butler #ishiguro #reading #writing #critique #ontology #blog #podcast #analysis

1 week ago 4 0 0 0

Just sharing a book cover design candidate in a blog post.

philosophics.blog/2026/04/13/t...

I'll be releasing it later this month.

#books #writing #cover #art #design #minimalism #novella #philosophy

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The Environment Always Wins: The Myth of Pure Voice There’s a certain kind of cultural panic that tells you more about the panickers than about the thing they are panicking about. The current hysteria over AI-inflected prose is a good example.…

A colleague shared a post today that inspired this, let's say, response.

philosophics.blog/2026/04/12/t...

#blog #podcast #philosophy #language #LLMs #artificialintelligence #virtuesignalling #culture #gatekeeping #art #creativity #innovation #psychology #society ##games #books #reading #writing

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Funny, That I find myself interesting, not in a narcissistic way, but in examination. I wrote an academic blog post (and then a couple others, 1, 2) to clarify a nonfiction book that commenced as an academic e…

Sometimes, ideas are contagious.
philosophics.blog/2026/04/12/f...
I've been doing a lot of writing around a common theme and generating fiction and nonfiction alike. And it's nice to be writing fiction again.
#philosophy #writing #fictionwriting #nonfiction #essays #blog #publishing #time #thisguy

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Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil – A Close Reading? I joined a scheduled close reading of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil recently and came away less refreshed than exasperated. I will spare the platform and the hosts, not out of charity exactly, b…

Grandpa Simpson raising a fist and yelling at clouds. I attended an online close-reading™ of Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil, and let's just say, I came away disappointed, and so I wrote about it.

philosophics.blog/2026/04/11/n...

#philosophy #reading #writing #blog #podcast #books #nietzsche

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Art or Content So glad I took time out to watch a short exchange between Rick Beato and Justin Hawkins on whether music is becoming content rather than art. The question is framed in musical terms, but it hardly …

I'm leery of the AI debate over creative content – audio or visual media. A recent interview between Rick Beato and Justin Hawkins provided me with a frame.

philosophics.blog/2026/04/10/a...

#philosophy #music #art #ai #language #perception #psychology #video #virtue #writing

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Meta of The Box My attention has yet again been abducted by fiction, tentatively titled The Box, but this time it is (ever so slightly) different. A published mate suggested that no one reads nonfiction, and anywa…

Busy past few days, so a quick update on my current project.

philosophics.blog/2026/04/09/m...

I discuss the meta and sources of inspiration for this writing project, literary speculative fiction.

#philosophy #inspirations #sources #writing #fiction #update #blog

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Celebration It’s Easter Sunday as I type this, but the celebration is about the performance of my essays. Whilst the metric to consider is the number of citations, I need to be satisfied with the number …

I've been putting off posting about my 5,000+ essay downloads in deference to more 'important' pieces, but since my weekend was occupied plotting a new story idea, I have space for a short celebration. 🥳

philosophics.blog/2026/04/06/c...

#philosophy #essays #writing #reading #fiction #nonfiction

2 weeks ago 4 0 0 0

Language Insufficiency Meets Generative AI Language is a poor communication vehicle. I share some examples.

A Language Insufficiency Hypothesis predicts this.
open.substack.com/pub/brywilli...
#philosophy #language #midjourney #images #rendering #communication #vectors #ai #genai #generativeai #languageinsufficiency

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This is a separate point. Mine isn't about storytelling. It's about language as a vehicle for correspondence or coherence to 'reality', the point being that language won't allow a person to communicate precisely what they want. Conveying every nuance of the dog, tree, and woman can't be done.

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Why They Aren't Idiots (And Neither Are You – Definitely Maybe) On Ontological Commitment, the Limits of Language, and Why Political Arguments Go Nowhere

This isn’t my first post discussing why not all political disagreement is rational, and your interlocutors may not be ignorant, stupid, or arguing in bad faith.

open.substack.com/pub/brywilli...

#philosophy #politics #policy #intelligence #ontology #ignorance #blog #substack

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It may be, but the object of communication is usually accuracy and precision rather than drift.

My point is that language can't achieve a faithful reproduction of a scene, only a lossy approximation.

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Penalties stack up as AI spreads through the legal system Early scandals have not slowed lawyers' adoption of AI tools, even as court sanctions over fake legal briefs continue to rise.

Using AI in a legal context is perfectly defensible. Not following up and not performing due diligence is lazy and derelict.

www.whro.org/2026-04-03/p...

#philosophy #law #ai #negligence #duediligence #performance #npr #lawyers #responsibility #accountability #writing

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The Insufficiency of Language Meets Generative AI I’ve written a lot on the insufficiency of language, and it’s not even an original idea. Language, our primary tool for sharing thoughts and ideas, harbours a fundamental flaw: it&#8217…

In a post from 2024, I made a point on the insufficiency of language to faithfully render an image from a prompt, a specific woman and dog.
philosophics.blog/2024/11/08/t...
#philosophy #language #llm #genai #ai #image #translation #interpretation #cognition #consciousness #perspective #blog #art

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When Syntax Is Asked to Bear Too Much v1.2 I published the first version of this essay in February, arguing that the Frege–Geach problem, that three-score-year-old albatross around expressivism’s neck rests on a category error. Analyt…

I've finally published my essay resolving the Frege–Geach problem.

philosophics.blog/2026/04/04/w...

Or have I? You tell me.

#philosophy #language #expressivism #essay #blog #semantic #identity #morals #ethics #emotivism #categoryerror #syntax

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A Jellyfish Knows More About Time Than Your Physics Textbook Disclosure: I shouldn’t have to apologise for two consecutive posts written by Claude – previous post on duration and time – this time about reframing a chat about time and duration around th…

Third post on time versus duration, this time, brainless jellyfish are doing the teaching.

philosophics.blog/2026/04/03/a...

#psychology #philosophy #time #rhythm #terrain #map #jellyfish #brains #sun #days #temperature #environment #nature #life #reproduction #biology

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Why ProTools Knows More About Time Than Physics Does Disclosure: This post was written by Claude after a chat about time and duration. As a musician emeritus, I suggested the connexion between free time, metred time, and the quantising of ProTools. T…

I use music and a ProTools example to illustrate the difference between duration and time. I even invoked the debate between Bergson and Einstein in 1922.

philosophics.blog/2026/04/02/w...

#philosophy #physics #time #duration #blog #podcast #Einstein #Bergson #music #metaphor #social #ClaudeAI