Eric

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@RyanHaecker At the Diogenes Club.

In London, a long time ago

@dwaldenwrites @zenahitz Did she write about this anywhere?

Most of all, I think we need to heed Eva Brann’s advice that colleges should be “temporally cosmopolitan and spatially parochial,” that is, embracing all that’s been written but making choices based on the particular intellectual community’s needs, not national trends.

This is essentially correct on almost all counts. Gen ed needs to be formalized, faculty at most colleges need to be hired and retained primarily as teachers, and the R1 model needs to be far less incentivized by federal education policy.

I've said it before, I'll say it again: this is too optimistic. USC, for instance, always a rich kids school, just announced a planned integration of AI with their curriculum.

@jennfrey @TerenceJSweeney You mean Canvas. Canva is actually fun and useful.

We never needed blackboard or canva. And we could just stop using them and everything would be fine.

@zenahitz *Canvas! Canva, on the other hand, is a fun graphic design app.

Amen sister

Yes. We have two choices: reconcile ourselves to zombie institutions that credential without meaning, or re-scale our educational endeavors. The latter was always worth doing -- the crisis is an opportunity.

Camille Pissarro's picture from the early 1870s, is a nod to his abiding friendship with Paul Cézanne - they had known each other since the 1860s and would often paint side-by-side in both Pontoise (seen here) and Auvers-sur-Oise, drawing inspiration from one another. Pissarro’s style in his Pontoise period can be thought of as derived from the combination of the influences of Claude Monet and JMW Turner, who had both widely contributed to the redefinition of landscape painting. The small-scale patches visible in the paint handling are characteristic of Monet, whilst the earthy colour palette recalls Turner’s late paintings.

@AdamFrank4 @MGleiser @AlexLerchner 6/6 AI is powerful precisely because it carries forward human cognitive structure - but it remains dependent on it. Curious to hear thoughts from others working across AI and philosophy.

@AdamFrank4 @MGleiser @AlexLerchner 4/6 This shift in perspective, which draws on the phenomenology of Husserl, helps unify several observations: - why LLMs are fluent yet hallucinate - why scaling improves recall but not compositional reasoning - why VLMs struggle with object persistence & whole-part relations

1/6 I’m excited to share a new paper: “The Origins of Artificial Intelligence in Natural Intelligence” microsoft.com/en-us/research… A persistent puzzle: Why do AI systems exhibit fluency & coherence- yet struggle with reasoning, truth reliability, and object-level intuitive physics?

Milosz was truly one of the great poets of the 20th century. Just read this new volume on a time of transition (fleeing the aftermath of WW2 into diplomatic service) and contains two gut punch meditations on wickedness & survival in war: "Child of Europe" & "Treatise on Morals"

Amid declining liberalism & multiple political crises, we need to retrieve Thomas More’s playful invention of Utopia as a guide for a politics of hope. New book with my friend David Albertson out July 21 with Yale UP—preorder here: tinyurl.com/y8drpjve

Following our discussion of Erik Peterson's 1935 essay 'Monotheism as a Political Problem', I will begin to share Ai generated summaries of our discussions. 🧵 drive.google.com/file/d/1Mnp_uT…

@AimeTim These prices just seem so unjust and downright criminal. Hopefully an affordable paperback will come out in two years or less...

New publication: “Edith Stein and Max Scheler in Dialogue” bloomsbury.com/uk/edith-stein…

@MethexisATX I don't see the text at the link. It just opens a Google Meet.

@MethexisATX This sounds really worthwhile. Would love to join. Is it open to anyone? Second question, what other texts are going to be read in the series? Thanks

At 1 pm CST on Sunday 3 May, we start a series of readings in political theology. The Methexis Institute Forbidden Books reading group will host a discussion of Erik Peterson's essay 'Monotheism as a Political Problem' (1935). Link to join: meet.google.com/roo-wesv-mye

Watching Bob Ross videos all morning.

'Sun, Sea and Sky: a Summer Phantasy,' (1892) is unique in John Atkinson Grimshaw’s body of work. It's remarkable in its minute Boudin-like detail with each grouping of figures given characterisation and individuality, location: Scarborough in Yorkshire.