Preface/Reboot/Update

Friends and family, known and unknown:

I have been much fresh content, and am going to start publishing it tomorrow. But before I did so, I wanted to make a short personal note, or write a contextual preface unrelated to the content of the project itself, for my existing sign-ups and subscribers. It will be deleted in a couple days from Substack itself, and will live on only in these emails that you have received. 

It has been over a year since I sent anything out here. Last time I did write some things, last summer, that too was framed as a fresh start. And I've wiped the slate clean again, declaring that I have new content to publish. Why, and what is different this time? The last year (notably even among the last few years) has been full of flux. Since my last essay last August, I have changed residences three times, each of those being moves into a different city than where I was (with circumstances recently leading me back to New York City, from where I last sent out a post). Over the course of that, the plan that I had as of last summer unraveled and morphed into something, I hope, that is better suited to my work. 

Here is what will change:

A big part of what I introduced last year was an "Edifice" of networked, atomic notes systematizing a rigorous logical structure to all my ideas. I continued to develop that over the previous winter and spring, but I am putting that on hold for now, since the more I got into it, the more I realized that the kind of systematization in formal logic that I was attempting was, well, a huge undertaking (there's a reason philosophers don't write tomes as an exhaustive composite of various axiomatic assertions, enthymemes, conditionals and arguments made up of those). Hopefully with more time and financial freedom (to the extent these are meaningfully different), I will devote myself to that as well. I also started making video essays corresponding to my texts. That is less consuming, but at least initially, I'm holding off on that. I may get back to that soon, I may get back to that not at all, I don't know. However, at least to begin with, I’m going to experiment with audio transcriptions accompanying the Substack posts.

My principal goal right now, that to which I'm giving all the time and energy I have at hand for this project, is to write down and publish my philosophical ideas in simple, textual posts. After however many months it takes to lay things out at the current stage of development, I will go deeper into all of them, fleshing them out in relation to existent philosophical thought related to them (and refining, perhaps refuting myself). But for now I just want to tell you what I think, all that I think, as fast as possible.

This time I have already prepared a few essays besides this first one, to be sure myself, more than anything, that the wagon will keep rolling onward, unlike the previous time I recommenced operations. 

To those who have continued to subscribe (like, with money) to this over these months, I don't know why you kept doing it, but I don't take the show of confidence lightly. Thank you.

ISR
New York, NY
October 2024