Concepts
The ideas that recur across the essays, each time deepened. An index for readers who want to navigate by argument rather than by date.
The Fiction Layer
The layer of shared fictions — institutional facts, collective agreements, structures of meaning — that makes civilisation possible. Money, law, marriage, nations, corporations. None exist in nature. All require ongoing human participation.
Attunement
The shared responsiveness that members of a community develop through practice. Not a rule or a skill but a way of going on together — of knowing, without being told, what counts as relevant, appropriate, or significant in a given situation.
Acknowledgment
Cavell's distinction from knowledge: to acknowledge is not merely to know something but to bear the weight of knowing it. A system can know a fact. Only a creature can acknowledge what the fact means.
Form of Life
Wittgenstein's concept: the shared patterns of activity, response, and agreement within which language and meaning operate. Not a theory but the ground on which theories become possible.
Mimetic Desire
Girard's insight: we do not want things because they are valuable. We want them because someone else wants them. Desire is borrowed, not original. The model — the person we imitate — is prior to the object.
The Reverse Jevons Paradox
As tools for understanding grow more powerful, fewer people understand in the inhabitable sense. Efficiency in processing does not produce — and may actively erode — the human capacity for judgment.
Conceptual Clarity
The philosophical discipline of getting distinctions right before building on them. Not pedantry but operational precision: the cost of a confused concept scales with the system that implements it.