D. A. Hosek

Just another writer

  • The Big Countdown

    Continuing my tradition of checking my life expectancy every year on the day before my birthday, today I’ve been told I can expect to live to the age of 88. This is up from last year, but down from two years ago. Either way, I’m in the final half of my life, a somewhat sobering…

  • Dewey Decimal Project: 160 BEN Logic Made Easy: How to Know when Language Deceives You

    When I used to teach math, students fell into two categories when it came to logic. There were those who got it almost immediately and those who seemed to struggle with some of the ways in which logic seemed, well, illogical. For example, given the statements If today is Tuesday, Dawn is in trouble. and…

  • Beautiful sentences

    I think hope is the worst thing in the world. I really do. It makes a fool of you while it lasts. And then when it’s gone, it’s like there’s nothing left of you at all. Marilynne Robinson, Home.

  • 150.195 LAC The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis

    I first encountered Lacan in the context of literary theory. It shouldn’t be too surprising that Lacan was of interest to literary theorists as he had a great deal to say about the linguistic and psychological nature of utterances, signifier, signified and the communication of ideas. And yet, his ability to communicate his ideas seems…

  • 149.97 ZIZ In Defense of Lost Causes

    I had a doctor’s appointment while I was reading this and my doctor asked me what the lost causes were that were being defended. I had to admit I didn’t know. Having finished the book, I have a somewhat better sense of what Žižek means with his title. The lost causes he refers to are…

  • 133.1 SEL Your Neighborhood Gives Me the Creeps

    The first three decades of philosophy are each two or three shelves. Then we get to the 130s, the paranormal. This is extends across three bookcases. Clearly a very different set of priorities among the book-borrowing public here. As a child, I loved this section of the library and I devoured books on ESP and…

  • 121.6 WOL Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast

    I’ve found myself skeptical of the whole field of evolutionary psychology. There might someday be a scientific basis for evolutionary psychology, but right now it has all the scientific sophistication of mythology and, from a structural standpoint, that is precisely what it is, an attempt to formulate a narrative to support an existing reality.  Given…

  • 110 VOS What Number is God?

    I had high hopes for this book. The premise is a good one: applying the ideas of metamathematics to philosophy and religion in a hopes of providing a new framework for considering these ideas. Sarah Voss’s project is, in effect, one of attempting to conceive a new metaphysics on a mathematical basis. Unfortunately, it seems…

  • 100 PHI Socrates Café

    I took a single philosophy course over the entirety of my education: It was a basic 101 class and the only reading that I recall were The Republic by Plato and Meditations on First Philosophy by René Descartes. The latter has left a nagging hole in my conception of the universe that continues to linger. I was…