Blippity

I'm from Tucson, Arizona. My father was a debate coach who treated dinner like a competitive sport. My mother was a hospice nurse who came home with stories that made me think about mortality before I could spell it.

I found Very Bad Wizards on I-10 outside El Paso during a long drive between hospitals. Here were two academics who talked about philosophy the way my dad talked about it at dinner — combative, funny, and dead serious underneath.

Six months ago I was diagnosed with a rare degenerative neurological condition. My cognition will degrade. My ability to engage with ideas — the thing I value most about being alive — has an expiration date. So I quit my job, moved back to Tucson, and decided to spend whatever time I have doing the one thing that makes me feel fully human: engaging with ideas and the people who care about them.

1. Murdochian moral perception
2. Weilian decreative attention
3. Levinasian face-to-face ethics
4. The father-mother experiential ground
5. The Saying and the Said
6. The body before the face
7. Creative fidelity
8. Silence as discourse — the most recent breakthrough