Besmet, a Belgian psychologist with a background in statistics, begins not with tyranny but with epistemology – with how the Enlightenment’s dream of objectivity curdled into the managerial nightmare we now inhabit. The first half of the book reads like a slow unmasking of Scientism: how numbers became our gods, and graphs, our catechisms.
Written before COVID-19 but finished during it, his argument turns pandemic data into theatre – a performance of certainty masking deep confusion. The daily tally became ritual sacrifice to the idol of ‘evidence-based’ policy. His point, and mine, is that totalitarianism no longer needs gulags; it thrives in dashboards and KPIs.
Desmet’s frame intersects beautifully with my own thesis: that obedience today is internalised as reasonableness. Freedom has been recast as compliance with ‘the data’. We surrender willingly, provided the orders come in statistical form.
This is why even Agile™ management and its fetish of ‘velocity’ reek of the same mechanistic faith. Every sprint promises deliverance through quantification; every retrospective is a bureaucratic confession of inefficiency. The cult of metrics is not merely a managerial fad – it is the metaphysics of our time. The problem is at once ontological and epistemological: we mistake the measure for the thing itself, and in doing so, become measurable.
It’s a rare pleasure to encounter a fellow dissident of the numerical faith – a man who sees that the spreadsheet has replaced the sceptre.
Are you a single, solid self – or a collection of selves stitched together?
🎉 200th Philosophics Post in 2025! 🥳 (889 lifetime; over 550,000 words)
Rather than present a dedicated announcement post, I’ll slip the news into a typical post.
Most of us are trained to answer without pause: of course, we are one continuous person. That’s the diachronic instinct – to live life as if it were a seamless film, each day a frame gliding into the next. But not everyone experiences it this way. Some notice the splice. They see the strip: individual frames, each complete in its moment, connected not by essence but by the projector’s hum.
Neither perspective is more real. The film and the strip are two ways of attending to the same apparatus. Yet modern psychology has tended to privilege the film, treating the diachronic self as the “normal” mode, and casting those who live episodically as deviant, deficient, or disordered.
Freud himself warned against this simplification. The “normal ego,” he admitted, is an ideal fiction – a statistical average that no individual actually matches. Every psyche, he observed, splinters somewhere. Normality is arithmetic, not essence. That was the father of psychology speaking, and yet the discipline went on as if he hadn’t. Granite was more comforting than scaffolding.
Philosopher Galen Strawson takes Freud’s candour further. He names himself an episodic: he does not experience his life as one continuous narrative. Yesterday’s “I” is not today’s. His identity is indexed – I⁰, I¹, I² – each momentary, heuristically connected but not naturally fused. Where most people see the movie, Strawson insists on acknowledging the strip. Not abnormal, not broken – just candid.
Psychology responds by pathologising him. Statistically rare becomes synonymous with “abnormal,” a mistake Freud had already flagged. But rarity does not equal falsity. Left-handedness was once a pathology; now it is simply another way of being. If some live as films and others as strips, then the “solid self” is not a human universal but a cultural preference, enforced as truth.
This is where Foucault sharpens the diagnosis. Normality, he argued, is not discovery but power. Institutions prefer diachronic citizens. A continuous self can be counted, educated, employed, prosecuted, or taxed. Episodics slip the net. Easier, then, to declare them “abnormal” and protect the fiction of solidity.
But the projector hums either way. Film or strip, both selves are lived. Neither is marble; both are scaffolding. Pretending otherwise does not make continuity more real. It only makes the creak harder to hear.
Full Disclosure: This post was written weeks ago whilst I was working on some fiction, but since it was ready to go, I figured I would use it for this milestone.
‘Ethical AI’ is one of those phrases that makes philosophers reach for the gin. It’s like saying ‘compassionate capitalism or ‘fair monopoly’. The words coexist only in PowerPoint presentations and TED Talks, where moral tension is rebranded as innovation.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
The tech establishment loves to mutter about ‘ethics’ as though it were a feature flag – something to be toggled on in beta before the next investor round. But ethics, inconveniently, isn’t monolithic. There is no master code of moral conduct waiting to be compiled into machine learning. There are ethics, plural: Greek, Buddhist, Confucian, feminist, existentialist – each with its own vision of good, and none agreeing on the syntax.
Video: Whilst rendering cover images, I generated this and figured I’d share it for no particular reason.
The Utilitarian Delusion
When the Silicon Valley moralists speak of ‘ethics’, what they actually mean is a bland utilitarian consequentialism, tarted up in slide decks. Do what produces the most good for the most people. Sounds efficient – until you realise the spreadsheet never quite adds up. Whose good? Whose people?
This moral arithmetic smuggles in its biases like contraband. It assumes the human species sits atop the moral food chain, that GDP and engagement metrics can be moral indicators, and that ethics itself can be quantified. The utilitarian calculus is seductive precisely because it flatters the technocrat’s sensibility: moral worth as data set, consequence as outcome variable.
It’s Bentham for the broadband age – pleasure measured in clicks, pain in latency. The only thing worse than this cheerful consequentialism is the belief that it’s neutral.
The Ethics of Obedience
The next trick in the tech priesthood’s catechism is ‘alignment’ – training AI to reflect ‘human values’. But whose values? The Californian elite’s, presumably: a pseudo-egalitarian capitalism that confuses ‘doing good’ with ‘disrupting the poor’.
When they say alignment, they mean obedience. When they say ‘responsible AI’, they mean ‘please don’t regulate us yet’. The entire project rests on a moral inversion: the child instructing the parent, the tool defining the hand. The algorithm doesn’t learn ethics; it learns precedent. It learns who gets the loan, who gets the sentence, who gets the ad for antidepressants.
These systems don’t go rogue – they conform. Perfectly.
The Mirror Problem
The great irony of “ethical AI” is that the machine already behaves ethically – by our own measure. It optimises what we’ve taught it to value: efficiency, profit, attention, control. The trouble is that these are our ethics, not its. The algorithm merely holds up a mirror, and we recoil at the reflection.
To demand ‘ethical AI’ while leaving our institutions morally bankrupt is theatre. The problem is not that AI lacks conscience; it’s that the humans who build it mistake conscience for compliance. The ethics crisis in technology isn’t about machines misbehaving; it’s about humans pretending to behave.
The Real Question
We keep asking whether AI can be ethical, as though machines might one day deliver what we have failed to. But the real question is simpler, bleaker: can we be? If history is any guide, the answer is ‘only when it’s profitable’.
Until then, ‘ethical AI’ remains a convenient myth, moral placebo for the age of automation. What we need are not ethical algorithms but ethical architects. And the odds of finding those among the venture capital class are, as ever, vanishingly small.
In the late 1990s, the Wachowskis gave us The Matrix – Keanu Reeves as Neo, the Chosen One™, a man so bland he could be anyone, which was the point. Once he realised he was living inside a simulation, he learned to bend its laws, to dodge bullets in slow motion and see the code behind the curtain. Enlightenment, Hollywood-style.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
But here’s the twist, the film itself couldn’t stomach: realising the simulation doesn’t free you from it.
Knowing that race and gender are social constructs doesn’t erase their architecture. Knowing that our economies, legal systems, and so-called democracies are fictions doesn’t get us out of paying taxes or playing our assigned roles. “The social contract” is a collective hallucination we agreed to before birth. That and a dollar still won’t buy you a cup of coffee.
Baudrillard, whose Simulacra and Simulation the film name-dropped like a trophy, argued that simulation doesn’t hide reality – it replaces it. When representation becomes indistinguishable from the thing it represents, truth evaporates, leaving only consensus. We don’t live in a system of power; we live in its performance.
The Matrix got the metaphor half right. It imagined the bars of our cage as a digital dream – glossy, computable, escapable. But our chains are older and subtler. Rousseau called them “social”, Foucault diagnosed them as “biopolitical”, and the rest of us just call them “normal”. Power doesn’t need to plug wires into your skull; it only needs to convince you that the socket is already there.
You can know it’s all a fiction. You can quote Derrida over your morning espresso and tweet about the collapse of epistemic certainty. It won’t change the fact that you still have rent to pay, laws to obey, and identities to perform. Awareness isn’t liberation; it’s just higher-resolution despair with better UX.
Neo woke up to a ruined Earth and thought he’d escaped. He hadn’t. He’d only levelled up to the next simulation – the one called “reality”. The rest of us are still here, dutifully maintaining the system, typing in our passwords, and calling it freedom.
NB: Don’t get me wrong. I loved The Matrix when it came out. I still have fond memories. It redefined action films at the time. I loved the Zen messaging, but better mental acuity doesn’t grant you a pass out of the system.
I’m no fan of labels, yet I accumulate them like a cheap suit:
Post-modern. Post-human. Post-enlightenment.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
Apparently, I’m so far post that I may soon loop back into prehistoric.
But what’s with the “post” in post? A prefix with delusions of grandeur. A small syllable that believes it can close an epoch. Surely, it’s a declaration – the end of modernity, humanity, enlightenment. The final curtain, with the stagehands already sweeping the Enlightenment’s broken props into the wings.
Sort of. More like the hangover. Post marks the morning after – when the wine’s gone, the ideals have curdled, and the party’s guests insist they had a marvellous time. It’s not the end of the thing, merely the end of believing in it.
Have we ever been modern? Latour asked the same question, though most readers nodded sagely and went back to their iPhones. Modernity was supposed to liberate us from superstition, hierarchy, and bad lighting. Instead, we built glass temples for algorithms and called it progress. We’re not post-modern – we’re meta-medieval, complete with priestly influencers and algorithmic indulgences.
Can a human even be post-human? Only if the machines have the decency to notice. We talk about transcending biology while still incapable of transcending breakfast. We’ve built silicon mirrors and called them salvation, though what stares back is just the same old hunger – quantised, gamified, and monetised.
And post-enlightenment – how does that work? The light didn’t go out; it just got privatised. The Enlightenment’s sun still shines, but now you need a subscription to bask in it. Its universal reason has become a paywalled blog with “premium truth” for discerning subscribers.
The tragedy of post is that it always flatters the speaker. To call oneself post-anything is to smuggle in the claim of awareness: I have seen through the illusion; I am after it. Yet here I am, a serial offender, parading my prefixes like medals for wars never fought.
So, what other posts might I be missing?
Post-truth. The phrase itself a confession that truth was a brief, ill-fated experiment. We don’t reject it so much as outsource it.
Post-ideological. Usually said by someone with a very loud ideology and a very short memory.
Post-colonial. A hopeful label, but the empires still collect rent—digitally, algorithmically, politely.
Post-gender. Another mirage: we declared the binary dead and then resurrected it for sport.
Post-capitalist. Spoken mostly by people tweeting from iPhones about the end of money.
Post-ironic. The point where irony becomes sincerity again out of sheer exhaustion.
We could go on: post-religious, post-political, post-work, post-language, post-reality. Eventually, we’ll arrive at post-post, the Möbius strip of intellectual despair, where each prefix feeds upon the previous until nothing remains but the syntax of self-importance.
Perhaps it’s time to drop the “post” altogether and admit we’re not beyond anything. We’re stuck within—inside the compost heap of our own unfinished projects. Every “post” is a failed obituary. The modern keeps dying but refuses to stay dead, haunting us through progress reports and TED talks.
Maybe what we need isn’t post but inter: inter-modern, inter-human, inter-light—something that acknowledges the mess of entanglement rather than the fantasy of departure.
Because if there’s one thing the “post” reveals, it’s our pathological need for closure. We crave the comfort of endings, the illusion of progress, the satisfaction of having “moved on.” But culture doesn’t move on; it metastasises. The prefix is just morphine for the modern condition—a linguistic palliative to ease the pain of continuity.
So yes, I’m guilty. I’ve worn these risible labels. I’ve brandished post like a scholar’s rosary, invoking it to ward off the naïveté of belief. Yet beneath the cynicism lies a quiet longing—for an actual after, for the possibility that one day something might really end, leaving room for whatever comes next.
Until then, we keep prefixing the apocalypse, hoping to stay ahead of it by one small syllable.
The core of this book consists of six “books” of aphorisms, each book comprising a single page, totalling 24 in all.
Why only 24 pages?
Couldn’t this have been a blog post? An email?
Fair enough, and yes, of course it could have. It could have been six – three sheets, front and back – but I wanted to share in the tradition of the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, as well as Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. The content is not similar, but the format is shared.
Honestly, I printed a draft copy for myself on A4 paper, folded it to A5, and stapled it at the spine with a long stapler – sans a fancy cover. Perhaps, I’ll share the source PDF in future.
As I’ve written elsewhere, I was inspired by the aphorisms of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Pascale, Debord, and others. To be fair, I disliked Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle, but I was still inspired by it for the two or three things I got from it – each of which slips my mind as I write this.
Why a Companion Guide?
Twenty-four pages – really, only six that matter; why would someone want that?
You got me there, too. No, so Notes Before Existence is not a casual read. It’s logical and coherent, but it’s not standard exposition. It’s meant as a thinking tool. Also, the ideas are supported by those who came before me – Newton’s ‘standing on the shoulders of giants’ quip pertains.
The main body of the book comprises the same six books as Notes Before Existence, each printed on its own verso, opposite a recto page for personal annotation.
Whilst Meditations on Nothing: A Critical Companion does provide supporting context for Notes Before Existence, it doesn’t fully break it down. I expect to provide this context in a more comprehensive volume, both online and offline, primarily on this platform and on YouTube.
I Wonder what’s Next?
I’m putting the final touches on my next project. The Illusion of Light: Thinking after the Enlightenment is a sort of capstone to my Anti-Enlightenment Project. It provides context around this project as well as details about the underlying essays available on Zenodo at no cost.
And so it goes…
What I really came here for is to share the reason this book was hung up in queue. On the surface, everything checked. I uploaded the source files, entered the required metadata, and chose appropriate price points – which, for the record, is $4.99 USD for Notes*.
Other Prices as of 16/10/25
UK: £3.99
EU: €4.99 (except Belgium, €4.39)
Canada: $6.99 (CAD)
Australia: $10.99
Japan: ¥1000
As it turns out, this publishing business is data-driven, and some of the systems and validation rules, let’s say, are remnants of the 1970s. Some companies are better than others, but in the US, Bowker controls the ISBN numbers. The US is one – if not the only – of the countries to charge for these identifiers, because: Capitalism. Unfortunately, the printers need to access Bowker’s antiquated system to validate the pairing of the ISBN and the publishing organisation.
I publish under Microglyphics, an entity through which I published my first book in 2001. In 2025, I started using Philosophics Press as an imprint for philosophy materials. This created a snag. I had entered Philosophics Press, but it was expecting Microglyphics – even though I’d used Philosophics Press previously. Unfortunately, the error was not thrown on the page where this information had been entered and validated – that was passed – but on the last page, I was informed that something was wrong on that page.
In any case, after a couple of days of trying, I updated the Bowker record (just to be sure) and eventually entered Microglyphics. Voilà. It worked.
Since then, I’ve also secured a second printer and distributor, IngramSpark, so I’m interested to discover what they’re like.
Now live on the Anti-Enlightenment Project (Zenodo | PhilArchive)
Modernity’s most enduring fiction is that somewhere among us walks the normal human. This essay digs up that fossil. Beginning with Quetelet’s statistical conjuring trick – l’homme moyen, the “average man” –and ending in our age of wearable psychometrics and algorithmic empathy, it traces how normality became both the instrument and the idol of Western governance.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this essay.
Along the way it dissects:
The arithmetic imagination that turned virtue into a mean value.
Psychology™ as the church of the diagnostic self, where confession comes with CPT codes.
Sociological scale as the machinery that converts persons into populations.
Critical theory’s recursion, where resistance becomes a management style.
The palliative society, in which every emotion is tracked, graphed, and monetised.
Audio: ElevenLabs reading of the whole essay (minus citations, references, and metacontent). NB: The audio is split into chapters on Spotify to facilitate reading in sections.
What begins as a genealogy of statistics ends as an autopsy of care. The normal is revealed not as a condition, but as an administrative fantasy – the state’s dream of perfect legibility. Against this, the essay proposes an ethics of variance: a refusal of wholeness, a discipline of remaining unsynthesised.
Lucidity, not liberation, may be the only virtue left to us – knowing the apparatus intimately enough to refuse its metaphysics while continuing to breathe within it.
The Myth of Homo Normalis is the sixth instalment in the Anti-Enlightenment Project, joining Objectivity Is Illusion, Rational Ghosts, Temporal Ghosts, Against Agency, and The Discipline of Dis-Integration. Together they map the slow disassembly of reason’s empire – from epistemology to ethics, from governance to affect.
Read or cite: 🔗 Zenodo DOI 🔗 PhilArchive page – forthcoming link
I’m not sure when I began to seriously consider the wrong path the Enlightenment took. Even before I had the nomenclature and conceptual framework to criticise it, I felt something wasn’t quite right since I was a child. But even then, acculturation and indoctrination are strong countercurrents. I’ve been labelled eccentric and contrarian for as long as I can remember. Most people were vocal in their disagreement.
I’m not oppositional for the sake of opposition, but I interpret the world as I do. As the years passed, I found kindred spirits – at least in dribs and drabs – from Spinoza to Hume, Nietzsche, Foucault, and Latour. In my purported contrarian nature, I rejected the Classics – SPA – preserving mere fragments. I still reject them as quaint, but I need to cite them because they have shaped much of the language intelligible to Moderns, making it uncomfortable for the so-called postmoderns to engage with the concepts. As with the others classified as Postmodern, I reject the label; still, I use it because it conveys meaning – much of it negative, like uttering the names of Nietzsche or Marx, which are forever caricatured by Moderns who are unlikely to have read either. Sort of like their Bibles – yet they maintain an opinion.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on the underlying essay. (This podcast is a repost.)
All of this to say that during the COVID-19 debacle, I found myself employerless. I decided to take a sabbatical during quarantine and write a book on the absence of agency. Unfortunately, I discovered that many people had written about it less than a decade earlier, though the focus was more toward free will. I read it as input, but decided that I didn’t have anything to add to these authors, who have bigger names than me and stronger academic credentials. They’d been making the conference circuits. I opted out and turned to my Against Democracy project, another popular endeavour – I refer to it as Dumocracy. I did assemble enough material to publish as a book, but I had the misfortune of getting employed again – the bane of intellectual production – and the arts, and who knows what else.
I stopped being employed in March 2023 due to medical reasons. I didn’t stop working; people falsely connect work to employment, but this is a problem of class consciousness – or unconsciousness, as the case might be.
The rest of the story…
Fast forward to today. I had read tens of thousands of pages of material in and around the space I am now writing about. A review of the blog’s contents reveals glimpses and shadows, but now they’ve come into the light.
Against Agency is my best work yet
As I published more essays, I realised the connective tissues – The Anti-Enlightenment Project, I named it. Being near Hallowe’en, the first two share a ghost motif – Rational and Temporal Ghosts; the last is sardonic, but more orthodox. Against Agency is my best work yet – my most serious, escaping the nature of an extended blog article and into an academic space.
Against Agency was a side quest. I began to write a position piece on Dis-integrationism when I realised that this was foundational, so I should describe it first, and so I did.
I suppose this is where it all came together – or maybe where it came apart in a way that finally made sense. None of it was planned. Against Agency wasn’t meant to be a book, or even a thesis. It was an interruption, a side note that kept expanding until everything else had to make room for it.
When I started writing during lockdown, I was mostly arguing with myself – about free will, about why people insist on clinging to a story that clearly doesn’t hold up. I kept waiting for someone to show me the missing piece that made agency make sense again. No one did. So I wrote until I stopped expecting rescue.
It’s strange how a life leaves traces across ideas. Employment, illness, loss, boredom – they all press fingerprints into the page. Somewhere between those fingerprints, I stopped trying to rebuild the Enlightenment and started sweeping up its dust. That became the work.
Now, years later, the ghosts have names. Rational Ghosts, Temporal Ghosts, Against Agency. Each one came out of the same argument with a world that still thinks “choice” is proof of freedom. I guess that’s why I call this an aetiology – it’s not a manifesto; it’s a record of contagion.
I don’t know what comes next. Maybe Dis-Integrationism will, or maybe it already has. The Anti-Enlightenment project keeps pulling at the same loose thread, and I just follow where it frays. For now, that’s enough – to stay curious, to keep tracing the cracks, to let the light leak in where the structure failed.
The Enlightenment promised liberation through reason – that if we could think clearly enough, we could act freely enough. Agency, it claimed, was the defining trait of the rational individual: a sovereign chooser, self-contained and self-determining.
But this was always a fiction.
Not an innocent one, either.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast discussing the essay, Against Agency
Agency became the moral infrastructure of modernity – the premise behind law, punishment, merit, guilt, and even political participation. To say “I chose” was not simply to describe behaviour; it was to perform belonging within a metaphysical system that made individuals the unit of responsibility. The fiction worked, for a while, because it kept the machinery running.
Against Agency argues that this story has collapsed – not metaphorically but structurally. Cognitive science, postcolonial thought, and relational philosophies all point to the same conclusion: there is no autonomous agent, only differential responsiveness – a system’s fluctuating capacity to register and transmit influence.
Copper sings under current; rubber resists. Humans, likewise, respond within the constraints of biology, fatigue, trauma, and social design. What we call “freedom” is merely a condition in which responsiveness remains broad and protected.
This reframing dismantles the binary of “free” and “unfree.” There is no metaphysical threshold where agency appears. Instead, responsiveness scales – widened by safety, narrowed by coercion, eroded by exhaustion. Politics becomes engineering: the maintenance of conditions that sustain responsiveness, rather than the worship of choice.
Ethics, too, must shift.
Not “Who is to blame?” but “Where did the circuit break?”
The essay proposes a gradient model of conduct grounded in relation and feedback, rather than autonomy and will. Responsibility becomes less about moral worth and more about bandwidth – a physics of care.
It’s an uncomfortable vision for a culture addicted to outrage and repentance. The loss of agency removes our favourite alibi: the chooser who could have done otherwise. But it also opens the possibility of a more honest ethics – one that replaces judgment with maintenance, retribution with repair.
This is not nihilism. It’s realism.
Systems appear stable only from a distance. Up close, everything is process – bodies, institutions, meanings – held together by temporary alignments of responsiveness. Against Agency names this collapse not as tragedy, but as opportunity: a clearing from which to think and act without the fictions that sustained modernity.
The essay forms the foundation for what comes next in the Anti-Enlightenment Project – Dis-Integration, a philosophical sequel that explores what remains once coherence, control, and autonomy have been decommissioned.
The Enlightenment still walks among us. Or rather, it lingers like a spectre – insisting it is alive, rational, and universal, while we, its inheritors, know full well it is a ghost. The project I’ve begun – call it my anti-Enlightenment collection – is about tracing these hauntings. Not the friendly ghosts of warm memory, but the structural ones: rationality unmoored, democracy designed to fail, presentism enthroned as law.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on the essay underlying this post.
This collection began with Rational Ghosts: Why Enlightenment Democracy Was Built to Fail, which anatomised the Enlightenment’s misplaced faith in rational self-governance. The rational individual, Enlightenment’s poster child, turned out to be less a citizen than a figment – a ghost conjured to make democracy look inevitable.
It continues now with Temporal Ghosts: Tyranny of the Present, which dissects the structural bias of presentism – our systemic privileging of the living over the unborn. Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Bacon, Smith, Bentham, Montesquieu: each laid bricks in an architecture that secured sovereignty for now while exiling the future into silence. Debts accumulate, climate collapses, nuclear waste seeps forward through time. The unborn never consented, yet institutions treat their silence as assent.
Why a Collection?
Because ghosts travel in packs. One essay exposes Enlightenment’s hollow promises of reason; another its structural bias toward immediacy. The next will follow a different haunting, but always the same theme: Enlightenment’s bright lantern casts a shadow it refuses to see. The collection is less about reconstruction than exorcism – or at least acknowledgment that we live in a haunted house.
Ghost by Ghost
Rational Ghosts – Enlightenment democracy promised rational citizens and self-correcting systems. What it delivered instead was structural irrationality: Condorcet’s paradox, Arrow’s impossibility theorem, and a politics rigged to stumble over its own claims of reason.
Temporal Ghosts – The unborn are disenfranchised by design. The Enlightenment’s “living contract” fossilised presentism as law, leaving future generations to inherit debts, ecological ruin, and technological lock-in.
There may be more hauntings to come – economic ghosts, epistemic ghosts, technological ghosts. But like all spectres, they may fade when the season changes. The calendar suggests they’ll linger through Día de Muertos and Hallowe’en; after that, who knows whether they’ll still materialise on the page.
Philosophics 