What do you think – should I?

In the other hand, many of these sites – and I visit and enjoy them – support very conservative, orthodox views that, as I say, don’t seem to have progressed much beyond 1840 – Kant and a dash of Hegel, but all founded on Aristotelian ideas, some 2,500 years ago.

Spoiler alert, I think knowledge has advanced and disproved a lot of this. It turns out my brothers in arms don’t necessarily agree. Always the rebel, I suppose.

Written by Bry Willis

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2–3 minutes

Some milestones arrive quietly; others tap you on the shoulder and whisper, “Well? Are you going to gloat, or shall I?”

So here we are. The Anti-Enlightenment corpus – yes, that unruly battalion of essays insisting that the Enlightenment was less a dawn and more a flash-bang grenade into the human psyche – is about to pass 1,000 downloads across Zenodo and PhilArchive. By the time you read this, the counter will likely have ticked over, as if to confirm that a non-institutionally affiliated heretic can, in fact, find readers willing to squint at philosophy written in the half-light.

I should say something gracious. Something humble. Something befitting a scholar who’s spent far too much time dismantling the sacred furniture of modernity.

Instead, I’ll say this:

Hooray for me!

Video: Midjourney woman sketch for no apparent reason (no sound)

And hooray for you, the masochists who keep downloading this stuff.

Whether it’s Objectivity Is Illusion, which politely reminds you that truth is just a social ritual in a lab coat, or Against Agency, where we pretend the autonomous self was ever more than Enlightenment-era fan fiction, or The Will to Be Ruled, in which we accept that most people would rather outsource their freedom to the nearest charismatic authoritarian – each piece contributes to the great unmasking of reason’s beloved myths.

If you’ve made your way through The Illusion of Light (cloth or paperback – the cloth is for people who enjoy prestige bindings with their epistemic despair – or on Kindle for the ones who have already surrendered), you’ve already walked the whole architecture: rooms filled with rational ghosts, temporal anxieties, moral fictions, and the faint smell of Enlightenment wiring beginning to smoulder.

And still you download. Saints, the lot of you.

A thousand reads does not confer legitimacy – nothing so vulgar – but it does confirm that the cracks in the Enlightenment’s porcelain façade are visible from more than one angle. It suggests that others, too, are learning to see in the dark, to navigate by afterglow rather than glare.

So: thank you.

For the curiosity.

For the tolerance of structural pessimism.

For indulging a scholar who insists on disassembling Western metaphysics one lovingly overlong sentence at a time.

Here’s to the next thousand. And the thousand after that. And to the collective, slow, post-Enlightenment work of maintenance in the half-light.

The Anti-Enlightenment lives on your hard drives now.

There’s no taking it back.

Written by Bry Willis and ChatGPT because Bry is off to Fiji, celebrating (or something like that.

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Tag: philarchive

PhilSurvey: What is the aim of philosophy?

Q4: The first one asks, ‘What is the aim of philosophy?’ Among the responses were:

Q3: What’s your position on aesthetic value?

Q2: What’s your position on abstract objects?

Q1: What’s your position on à priori knowledge?

What do you think – should I?

Hooray for Me – The 1,000-Download Threshold

Hooray for me!