Austin Williams

@mattleeanderson Ricoeur’s “Memory, History, Forgetting” could be a great anchor text for a course like this. David Carr’s Time, Narrative, and History is also helpful

I think I am going to teach a course this fall that is thematically organized around Memory, Reality and Time. What should we read? I'm interested in classic or classic-adjacent texts, poetry, smart fiction, etc. I have a provisional list, but give me your best ideas.

I do think our moment opens up very basic questions in a powerful way. Why, for instance, *know* anything, when all information can (seemingly) be accessed instantly, and presented without friction? Last weekend, I visited my parents, and it had snowed a bit over night. I stepped

LLM's are not a being for whom being is at issue.

Me: I study the history of sports and Christianity. I’ve seen it all. Nothing would surprise. Mississippi Baptist Pastor: Hold my grape juice.

I find this remarkable, to the point of being very skeptical it’s true. If it really is the case that large amounts of people were misled by the framing of this article, then we desperately need more creative journalism. Pls crack open some Joan Didion essays or something.

While I have a very different worldview than @jennfrey, I think she is right that scholars in the humanities have not sufficiently thought through all of the consequences of universalizing the hermeneutics of suspicion.

There is perhaps no more acute a pleasure than the encounter with an idea that discloses features of the world you had not considered, that were completely unavailable to you before you encountered the idea.

Q Why are dolphins beautiful? A Because they exhibit porpoisiveness without porpoise

@lavitalenta Yes! The one and the same! Both of his Schelling books were integral to my dissertation. His life is as incredible as his scholarship

@WilliamsAustinM Wait is this the same SJ McGrath that wrote the schelling book??? This broke my mind. One of my favorite books ever

I have to plug Sean McGrath’s recent “The Lost Road.” Half philosophical memoir, half theological reflection on secular modernity - this is the most I have enjoyed a book in a long time.

@aufgehenderRest @GregorySMoss2 @Tomoji_Okuda @sakusakuran @Qwerty17890505 I had a great class with David W. Johnson a few years back which brought the Kyoto School into conversation with western phenomenology. I am sure he would be happy to offer an introduction to some of the figures in that school.

I do have an Episode on Nishitani feat Dr. Jason Wirth, but I would love to have future episodes on Nishida Kitarō, Tanabe Hajime, Tomonaga Sanjūrō ... please contact me via email cpsatoor@gmail.com or dm me here! @GregorySMoss2 @Tomoji_Okuda @sakusakuran @Qwerty17890505 2/2

Dear Kyoto School Scholars & Japanese Philosophy Students/Scholars. I would like to host a series of episodes on #TheYoungIdealist series featuring multiple episodes on important Japanese philosophers & their relation to Classical German Philosophy/Phenomenology/Marxism. 1/2

@gothburz This feels like a bat-signal for @lavitalenta

Last year I eliminated our PTO policy. I called it "unlimited." The board loved it. HR loved it. Finance really loved it. Let me explain why Finance loved it. Under the old policy, employees accrued 18 days per year. Unused days carried over. When employees quit, we owed them money. Cash. For days they earned but didn't take. That's a liability. On the books. $4.7 million in accrued PTO across 2,300 employees. I made it disappear. With one policy change. "Unlimited PTO." You can't accrue what's infinite. You can't owe what was never counted. The liability vanished. $4.7 million. Gone. The CFO sent me a bottle of wine. I told employees it was about "trust and flexibility." It was about the balance sheet. But "balance sheet optimization" doesn't fit on a careers page. "Unlimited PTO" does. We updated the job postings. Applications increased 23%. People love unlimited. Until they try to use it. Under the old policy, employees took an average of 17 days per year. Under unlimited, they take 11. That's not a bug. That's the design. When PTO is a number, people take the number. It's theirs. They earned it. Managers can't argue with a number. When PTO is "unlimited," people take nothing. Because unlimited comes with questions. "Is this a good time?" "Who's covering?" "What will people think?" The guilt does the enforcement. I don't have to say no. The culture says no. I just built the culture. We track time-off requests in Workday. I see everything. A senior engineer requested two weeks in July. His manager approved it. Officially. Then sent a Slack message. "Totally fine. Just wanted to flag that the Erikson deliverable overlaps. Probably fine. Just flagging." The engineer took four days. Unlimited means whatever your anxiety allows. For most people, that's less than before. Some employees don't take any PTO. We call them "high performers." They get promoted. Then they manage others. They don't approve much PTO either. The system self-replicates. A recruiter asked how we "stay competitive." I said, "Unlimited PTO." She asked how much people actually take. I said, "That's not tracked." It is tracked. I have a dashboard. I don't share the dashboard. We did an employee survey. 84% said they "appreciated the flexibility of unlimited PTO." 12% said they "wished they felt more comfortable taking time off." We published the 84%. The 12% went in a folder. The folder is called "Noted." I don't open that folder. Someone in engineering asked if we could go back to accrued PTO. I said, "That would limit your flexibility." He said he wanted limits. I said, "That's not aligned with our culture of trust." He stopped asking. Trust is a funny word. I trust employees to feel too guilty to use their benefits. They trust me to frame that guilt as freedom. That's the deal. I'm presenting at an HR conference next month. The session is called "Unlimited PTO: Building a Culture of Ownership." Ownership means employees own their guilt. I own the savings. The policy costs us nothing. Because employees take nothing. And call it a benefit. I'll be VP of People by Q2. Unlimited upside.

@tenshi_anna I think this recent article by @second_sailing poses a challenge to some of this characterization. Kierkegaard is a certain kind of individualist, but not the kind that ignores the significance of our social and familial obligations. politicsandpoetics.co.uk/_files/ugd/4eb…

Being an adult, which is to say being mature enough on every relevant level to bear and raise children well, certainly also signifies spiritually a constitutive obligation of being-towards-others which demands an exit from mere childish fear of external corruption and an entry into a proactive struggle for the good outside of yourself and in collective life. But like Kierkegaard, who shamefully abandoned his fiancée to pursue a ridiculously self-absorbed career of casting sophistical spells on people in order to make them feel better about excusing their own responsibility-evading childish misanthropy to themselves, modern liberalism is founded on the ideology that we can enjoy our abstract masturbatory interiorities as much as we want without passing over into a genuine humbling of our own fantasies before the truth of collective life (which always, of course, works most fundamentally behind the backs of its bearers).

this nazarene religious zealot agitator just gave his life to save the souls of 68 IQ humans who couldn’t give less of a shit about him. the most disgraceful and humiliating end a person could possibly meet.

The admin is both right and wrong, but both for the wrong reasons.

Half of me wants to say “if Plato is too woke for a university, that institution is no longer a university.” The other half wants to say, “finally, a university admin gets that reading Plato might lead the students to raise dangerous questions about their customs.”

@CaseySpinks I would love to review this. I will ask around to find the right venue

'Kierkegaard's Ontology' will be published one month from today. If you're a scholar, please consider reviewing the book, asking your library to buy a copy, or spreading the word to someone who might like to read it. bloomsbury.com/us/kierkegaard…

This has flown a bit under the radar, but DBH recently released a collected volume of his “Roland” columns. It is delightful and insightful, particularly in the final essays exploring accelerationism and the principle of sufficient reason.

I am grateful for all the opportunities I was afforded this year, but I am radically committed to never living this way again. I love philosophy and I love teaching, but to teach well, I must live well. My one resolution for 2026: Do less

To do all this, I sacrificed: - My health - All non-work interests (besides sleeping and eating) - Active participation in my community - My natural curiosity On the alter of academic productivity.

2025 Year in review: - Finished and defended my dissertation - Taught or co-taught 18 sections of 9 graduate classes in 3 different modalities (8 new preps) - Advised 63 students at once - Chaired 2 different MA programs