Ben Porter

Been doing a lot reading today and revisiting old memories. Francis was the Pope when I became Catholic. Because of that, he holds a...

Definitions of intention are slippery. Is it an act? A mental event? Do we detect it by logic, intuition, syntax? The question of what an...

Engels clarified for Ernest Bloch the relationship of economics to other social factors in historical materialism: while “the production...

Thinking today about Mark Zuckerberg’s “free speech” turn and the refashioning of Facebook in the mold of X. It seems like the cultural...

(See paper here for footnotes) (See slides here ) Introduction  D.G. Meyers begins his history of academic creative writing with a story...

I’ve been ruminating on  Suan Sonna and Austin Suggs’ recent discussion on Suggs’ YouTube channel. It brought out something I take to be...

Madeline Cash is doing something really smart in Earth Angel.[1] Her’s are stories of a certain kind of moral situation. It's a situation...

The Old English scholar John Niles charges the immense success of philological scholarship in Beowulf with obscuring more basic questions...

This an issue which may be old news to some. But I've talked with feminists who don't know anything about this debate so may be worth it...

Some powerful critique here by Walter Benjamin on the emergence of capitalism and protestant religion—seems to be hand in glove with...

On the popular YouTube series Hot Ones, Khloe Kardashian discussed a photograph taken of her for Complex Magazine's 2015,...

I think it’s been since Kant that when we hear the word “mystery” we hear the wrong thing. “Faith” too. For us these words explain things...

Donald Davidson’s 1973 essay “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme” has been widely applied due to the epistemological range of its...

This will be the first of a string of posts reflecting on my conversion from Protestantism to Catholicism. If you’re a friend and you...

I should start this by saying that I love Foucault. I am not a follower but there is no one who brings it harder, is more brilliant, or...

Mother of God of Belozersk, Fr. Silouan Justiniano 2012. Egg tempera and gold on gessoed panel, 18 x 32 in. Given the season, I’ve...

Mark Rothko, No. 10, 1950. Yesterday I asked my wife to read five pages of a story I am writing. The notes she gave were predictably...

What follows is something that will pop up from time to time. Think of it as a series on the blog, or if the blog were a house, a certain...

Good news this morning: I discovered I am a finalist for the William Van Wert Prize in Short fiction. Big thanks to those judges at...

Prolegomenon What follows are some notes. They regard a research topic I’m entertaining which may work toward some dissertation ideas....