Thales/Salon
The Salon.
A reading public — slow, considered, and present. Pose a question. Join a circle. Find the people you'd like to be wrong with.
Pose a question to the salon — “What do I owe to a stranger?”
Open threads.
All threads →Is the Trolley Problem still useful, or have we exhausted it?
Forty years of trolleys later, I'm starting to wonder whether the thought experiment hasn't done more to flatten our moral imagination than to sharpen it. Counter-arguments welcome.
Avicenna anticipated Descartes — does the lineage matter?
Six centuries before the Meditations, the floating man already isolated the self from sensation. Yet Descartes is the one we read first. What's the philosophical cost of that ordering?
Reading Arendt in 2026.
Eichmann in Jerusalem keeps reading less like history and more like a manual. I want a working group on this — a careful, slow re-read, ten of us, ten weeks.
Is "useful uselessness" really an ethics, or an aesthetic?
Zhuangzi's gnarled tree survives because no one wants to chop it down. I keep wanting to call this beautiful — but my Confucian readings keep insisting it's also a moral position. Help me think.
Hume's bundle: missing furniture, or no room at all?
When Hume looks for himself and finds only perceptions, the standard reading is "no self." But there's a richer reading where the self just relocates to the bundling — a verb, not a noun.