Pierrick Simon

Still proud of making that one:

This is a preliminary paper for my larger project on the notion of 'medically unexplained symptom'. This notion runs together several importantly distinct phenomena and ultimately serves to further controversialise infection-associated chronic conditions like ME and Long COVID. Stay tuned!

Chloé de Canson, Diseases as Homeostatic Property Clusters - PhilPapers Several philosophers have recently drawn on property cluster accounts of natural kinds to argue that individual diseases form natural kinds. According to them, diseases have a super-explanatory proper...

My paper on disease has been accepted at Philosophy of Medicine!

I argue that diseases form homeostatic property clusters: their underlying pathomechanisms cause clustering in their symptomatology, biological signature, response to treatments, and prognosis

philpapers.org/rec/CANDAH

We are losing stars one streetlight, one neon sign, one suburb at a time For most of human history, the night sky has been a shared inheritance, a source of wonder. Now, more than a billion children see barely any stars in the night sky above their homes. So what does that...

“You understand your place in the universe very quickly when you look at something 1 billion light-years away … and realise that those photons, they predate dinosaurs, they predate humans, they predate the continents,”
www.abc.net.au/news/2026-03...

requiem for vanished birdsong

Joyeux anniversaire ! La planète a de la chance de t'avoir !

🙏 🙂

Let me know if there are passages you'd like to see in the original Middle English.

And I've got an online essay, here, on another piece from that author:

thesideview.co/journal/the-...

Here we go @bodhidave.bsky.social ! I'm giving it a try!

A Common Kingfisher in England. It has blue upperparts, orange underparts and a long bill link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Alcedo_atthis_-England-8_(cropped).jpg

Great Day today. First, I saw a cormorant. As the zen poem says: it flew over the river, not intending to cast its reflection in the water
& likewise, the water had no mind to retain its image.

But I, a fool, chased after it!

Instead, found my very first KINGFISHER! What colours!

(wikipedia pic)

Taking a View from Above In March 2025, I practiced a wonderful philosophical exercise called the “View from Above”. It consists in using reason and imagination to p...

Around this time last year, I developed a sense of cosmic perspective by practicing the "View from Above" exercise. By imagining what our situation looks like from the sea of stars, we can re-contextualize our concerns and feel exalted! #philsky

philosophicalexercises.blogspot.com/2025/04/taki...

I think learning bird songs will make me a better phenomenologist !

This evening, quick & loud, songs were cutting through the shroud of darkness: the spring greetings of the blackbird!

The most wonderful evening walk today:
The bright moon like a huge white mountain in the sky.
The dazzling pink and orange of sunset.
A falcon perched in an unusual spot, in an unlikely street, to visit those who look up.

Driving by on a country road showing green fields behind a metal fence.

"For still there are so many things that I have never seen: in every wood in every spring there is a different green."

-J. R. R. Tolkien

Amazing picture. The ocean is wonderful, and so is your relationship with it. :) !

So that lack of translation is creating misinterpretations that prevent some people from understanding & integrating the new attitude. At worse, 'pacing' is imagined to be yet another effortful chore that you add on the to-do list. It is not understood as a new way of relating to your activities.

It makes me think of my indian philosophy teachers telling me "as a point of method, we have to translate 'nirvana'. If we don't do it, people do not think about what it means. Whereas if you translate it as 'extinction', people start to wonder: 'hold on, extinction *of what*?'" Can't reify nirvana!

During that session of 'pacing', you turn off all the lights and be as idle as possible. I heard about a doctor prescribing those "sessions" of pacing. There might be good enough reason to prescribe that (some people need to do that) but still, something can be lost in translation. Misconceived.

I'm seeing fascinating miscommunications in the French #ME/CFS community. Some use the word "pacing" (not straining yourself) without translating it. As a result, they don't see it as modulating existing activities, instead it is reified, so that you could say "I will go do a session of 'pacing'" 🧵

I watched High Life: very good. Think "2001: space odyssey" but if the "humanity" you bring to space is just french brooding: Eros, Thanatos, and Standing Around Doing Nothing. Usually you smoke cigarettes while Standing Around. The movie is worse & downright nihilistic for not including that.

I am now picturing you at the Globe Theatre using fancy opera glasses at the end of a little stick to better watch two peasant characters making bawdy jokes before we go back to the main love story between aristocrats

I was once reading a Borges book that my husband had annotated that had a note that simply said, “solipsism?” As a loving wife, I immediately mocked him and now whenever anyone is being pretentious, we murmur, “solipsism?”

from Reddit: "I don't have suggestions, but I'll just confirm that, yes, twitching and twitcher have a negative connotation. It's a derisive term more often used in the UK birding community but familiar elsewhere. It describes a type of birder who hardly cares for birds themselves but merely cares about adding a tick to one's lifelist. People have stories of twitchers driving a thousand miles to the site of an extreme rarity, stepping out of the car, getting a photo, and getting right back in the car and heading home. Twitchers are sometimes described as deeply selfish and sometimes unethical; they might hoard information about interesting birds or enjoyable birding sites, not help others spot what they're seeing, might trespass, might use playback during breeding season, etc. In North America the rough synonym is listing or lister, though that has a less harsh meaning. It often encompasses the hobby of keeping track of sightings in personal ways, such as what you've seen at home (a yard list), in your local area (a patch list), or any number of arbitrary lists that are effectively a side-game to play while still enjoying birds as something more than a "collectible"."

Just learned a new word from the bird watching community. "Twitcher" = someone who doesn't care about birds for themselves but only cares about the achievement of spotting rare birds, like it's a collection game. I can't wait to philosophize about this phenomenon!

A poster for an event at York Literature Festival. The poster reads: Let's Get Philosophical: Writing Philosophical Fiction, Friday 6th March, 2 pm, York Medical Society, Stonegate, York. Creative writing workshop led by Rachel Handley. There is a photo of the author who has short brown hair, glasses, and is wearing a green jumper. The cover of their book, Possible Worlds and Other Stories is pictured to the right of their author photo. In the background of the poster is a photo of the York shambles on a rainy but lovely day.

Come write some philosophical fiction with me in York @yorklitfest.bsky.social!

Everyone is welcome and all you'll need to bring with you is a pen and paper.

Tickets and more event info: www.yorktheatreroyal.co.uk/show/lets-ge...

#York #CreativeWriting #PhilSky @uoyphilosophy.bsky.social

I complain a lot about how awful writing is, but the reality is that it’s also a joy. Like all art, there’s dissatisfaction in the end, & the process is often frustrating, but the creation is also incredibly satisfying. It’s rewarding, in part, *because* it is hard.

Day 4 of frying my brain trying to make this eccentric idea work. I finally feel like I have a handle on it (shortened my sleep to go write it down). But then again, I felt that way several times before and it slipped away again like a fish. The highs are high and the lows are low. Back to sleep.

Here's the first two that come to mind:

virtualmoose.org by @michaelklamerus.bsky.social

imightaswellexplainthejoke.com by @graysond.bsky.social

Philosophical Exercises

I have a little blog where I write about philosophical exercises and they make me really happy. My last post was about bird-watching as a philosophical exercise. I predict I'll talk about the things that make my heart sing more and more.

philosophicalexercises.blogspot.com

who's blogging these days? who has a weird little corner of the internet where they write about things that make them happy?