by Christopher Hall Philosophers aren’t under the same obligations as scientists; they may come to a conclusion first and then work backwards through the argument. This may be because the alternative to a given conclusion is undesirable; Derek Parfit, for example, spent his career defending moral realism because, to him, the alternative was a relativism…

by Christopher Hall How far does Trump’s bad taste go towards explaining his presidency? A long way, thinks Paul Krugman: …is it any surprise that Trump is turning the White House into Mar-a-Lago North? This is all deeply alien to American tradition. Washington DC is a city full of grand monuments and impressive public buildings.…

by Christopher Hall One thing the commotion over Jamir Nazir’s Commonwealth Prize-winning story “The Serpent in the Grove” – allegedly written by AI – has proven is that close reading is definitely not dead. I doubt if any recently published story, prize winning or not, has come under such scrutiny. Phrases denoting the presence of the…

by Christopher Hall I did something a little odd this past semester: I had my students write an assignment where I instructed them to use AI as much as they wanted. The assignment was to produce a cover letter and a resume to respond to a job ad I had given them; normally, for any…

by Christopher Hall The “literary thought experiment” is not a particularly well-explored genre. Ursula K. LeGuin’s short story is of course a famous one; we might say that other examples include Swift’s A Modest Proposal and stories by Borges and Ted Chiang. Like thought experiments in philosophy and physics, these challenge us to see how…

by Christopher Hall There’s a certain problem with the status of the word “criticism” in the phrase “literary criticism.” The critical part seems to be concerned, as criticism is in general, with separating the wheat from the chaff, but the literary part seems already to have made a judgement about quality – as long as we…

by Christopher Hall The problem with teleological thinking as far as authoritarianism goes is that we can delude ourselves into believing that, given that we are not in an Orwellian State, and it looks unlikely that we’re going to get there, some of the current kvetching about the current situation may appear to be overblown.…

by Christopher Hall “The essence of repression lies simply in turning something away, and keeping it at a distance, from the conscious.” –Freud, “Repression” “Time and again, in conversation with friends, some of who have lost family members in this killing spree, there is a sense that one must be going mad: to see so…

by Christopher Hall “This business of a poet,” said Imlac, “is to examine, not the individual, but the species; to remark general properties and large appearances. He does not number the streaks of the tulip, or describe the different shades of the verdure of the forest. He is to exhibit in his portraits of nature…

by Christopher Hall This past October saw a peculiar heat wave in my corner of Ontario. 30 degree Celsius (around 86 degrees for those of you still using unenlightened temperature scales) is a kind of touchstone temperature for Canadians – a midsummer sort of heat, usually restricted to July and August, permissible in June and…

by Christopher Hall Some time ago – I can’t remember if it was before, during, or after the pandemic – I read Michael Finkel’s The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit, which is an account of Christopher Knight, a man who, in 1986, drove his car as far as…

by Christopher Hall What does it mean to turn somebody into an object, either literally, by killing them, or in a more conceptual sense, by robbing them of freedom of thought and action? This, according to Simone Weil in her celebrated essay on the Iliad, is the central topic of that poem: Here we see…

by Christopher Hall 2007’s Bioshock stands as a touchstone for many on the by-now perennial, and admittedly somewhat tiresome, question of whether video games are or could be art. I remember the game for what one remembers most first-person-shooters for – the joy of slaughtering successive waves of digital monsters – but there is one…

by Christopher Hall Sometime towards the end of March in 2016, I exited a movie theater in a white-hot rage. I don’t think my common reactions to bad movies are out of the ordinary – anything bemusement to doubts about the collaborative potential of the human race. (Some movies force you to confront the bald…

by Christopher Hall It is now close to 20 years since I completed my Ph.D. in English, and, truth be told, I’m still not exactly sure what I accomplished in doing so. There was, of course, the mundane concern about what I was thinking in spending so many of what ought to have been my…

by Christopher Hall When J. L. Austin published his book How to do Things With Words, his intent was to demonstrate that language must be understood to go beyond any mere reference function. We do not use language merely to point to things in the world, but also to enact things within the world. “I…

by Christopher Hall When this article is published, it will be close to – perhaps on – the 39th anniversary of one of the most audacious moments in television history: Bobby Ewing’s return to Dallas. The character, played by Patrick Duffy, had been a popular foil for his evil brother JR, played by Larry Hagman…

by Christopher Hall Despite writing my doctoral thesis on Alexander Pope’s An Essay on Man, a work most notorious for its poorly optimized optimism, I am something of a natural pessimist. Pessimism is at the right moments a potent tool for clarity (as is, even I have to admit, optimism, though not surprisingly I think…

by Christopher Hall “In 2025, during an event to celebrate the inauguration of Donald Trump for his second term, the richest man in the world gave a Nazi salute to the crowd.” This is a sentence which, circa 2005, would have made for a rather overblown introduction for a YA dystopian novel. But here we…

by Christopher Hall Comic horror’s fundamental lesson is that the world is not what it looks like. This thought is given particularly sharp expression in John Langan’s The Fisherman: ‘When I look at things – when I look at people – I think, None of it’s real. It’s all just a mask, like those papier-mâché…