All Articles
149 published articles, grouped by discipline
Philosophy
- Askability: Toward a New Method for the History of Ideas — Problems Have Histories Too
- Before the Code: Recursivity, Cultural Relativism, and the Mesocosmic Grounds of Moral Life — Both Rachels and the relativists he criticises share a hidden premise: that morality is primarily a matter of codes. LVT challenges that premise by descending below the code.
- Case Studies in Unearned Confidence (Part 3): The Illusion of Explanatory Depth Experiment Goes Down the Toilet — When an entire research program goes down the drain.
- Clarifying the Confused Debates on AI — An essay in memory of Hubert Dreyfus.
- Converting Mitsein: Heidegger and the Disappearance of Interrecursivity — Heidegger came closer to a full understanding of interrecursivity than anyone before him, but he never got there.
- Da Sein's Da Hakt's — Heidegger gave us the forest. Living Value Theory gives us the map.
- From Continuous Mediation to Interrecursive Ethics — The recognition of interrecursivity forces a complete revision of ethics in the mesocosm.
- From Wonder to System: The Transformation of Greek Philosophy From the Presocratics to Aristotle — Philosophy is about asking questions, and these questions have a history.
- Interrecursivity Is Not a Fixed Object: A Reply to the Boghossian Report (2026) — Any compelling argument about objectivity must first keep straight what kind of object it is talking about.
- Knowing How We Know That: A New History of Science — Why is knowledge supposed to be "produced" and "circulating" like it was an industrial commodity?
- More Partial Clearings: Lebenswelt, Dasein, Mesocosm — Retracing two predecessors of the mesocosm: Husserl's Lebenswelt and Heidegger's Dasein.
- Partial Clearings: Heidegger and the Mesocosm — How Heidegger saw only some parts of the mesocosm
- Philosophy in One Mediation — How Derrida and analytic philosophy share the same unexamined binary.
- Predicting the FIFA World Cup Winners 2026, Or: Why Interrecursive Futures Are Ontologically Uncertain — Spoiler alert: Spain beats Argentina 2-1.
- The Hail Mary Test (Part 2): Philosophy — Philosophical inquiry must start in the messy, vulnerable life worlds of embodied beings
- The Living World We Metaphorize By: How the Nonrecursive Mesocosm Is the Source of Ordinary Language — A radical revision of Lakoff and Johnson's theory of metaphors and image schemas.
- The Question Concerning the Question of Technology: Process Ontology, Vital Stakes, and the Ground of a Living Value Theory of Technology — Technologies are processes of continuous remediation within mesocosms.
- Une Erreur Sauvage: Lévi-Strauss's Structuralism Got Everything Wrong — There are no binaries in the mesocosm. All binaries are human symbolic impositions.
- Wait, What's That Right in Front of Me? Retracing Husserl's Path to Lebenswelt — Not another definition of Husserl's lifeworld, but a recovery of what prompted its rediscovery.
- What Is Philosophy? Heidegger and Mesocosmic Fit — There are two ways of teaching philosophy, and one of them is better than the other.
- Who Is I? a Living Value Theory of Narrating the Self — Both philosophies of the self and narrative theory have mistaken one possible recursive position as the totality of selfhood.
Art
- "Fuck It, Let's Go Bowling": Renewal of Worlds and Narrative Stakes in the Big Lebowski — A new theory of why we only return to narrative worlds that we actually want to inhabit.
- Being-With the Night: Mesocosmic Dreaming in Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood — "Only YOUR eyes are unclosed"
- Detecting Modernity: The Redistribution of Legibility, Transactive Dualism, and the Structural Logic of Detective Fiction — Why the detective genre emerged in the second half of the 19th century.
- Estranged Loops: Horror as Failure of Recursive Discernment — Redefining horror from the abject to the zombie.
- How Horror Works: Felt Misalignment and the Limits of Symbolic Interpretation — If dogs get scared of horror movies, purely symbolic interpretations cannot hold.
- Polytropos: Homer’s Odyssee as a Mesocosmology of Interrecursivity — Odysseus survives by understanding what matters to other living beings better than they understand it themselves.
- Predicting the Critical Responses to Nolan's Odyssey: "Culture Industry" in the Age of Social Media — Why were people so confident in passing verdicts on Nolan's Odyssey long before they had ever even seen the movie?
- Re-valuation as World-Making: Reading Ingeborg Bachmann's Poem "Böhmen Liegt Am Meer" — Poetry can enact the conditions under which a different world becomes livable
- Recursive Discernment as the Driver of Narrative — Why "I am your father!" ties together six Star Wars movies.
- Shanu-di — Memories of Shanu Lahiri (1928-2013)
- Stone, Stakes, and the Heavenly Jerusalem — A living value theory of why building massive cathedrals seemed like a good idea at that particular time.
- Storytime: Why We Enjoy Sharing Narratives so Much — Why it's pointless to skim read a novel or skip to the end as if what matters is the conclusion.
- The Moment When Time Became Moments: The Emergence of Historical Consciousness in Northern Renaissance Painting — The greatest innovation of Northern Renaissance painting may not have been perspective, but the invention of the past as a series of discrete moments.
- Tidying up Tagore: How Not to Use Tagore for Pedagogy, Psychotherapy, and Counselling Studies — Living words, dead systems, and the epistemic violence of systematization
- Unsettling the Accounts: The Origins of the Money Economy in the Arnolfini Portrait — How northern Renaissance painting intensified audience engagement.
- What the Narrator Knows and Why: Recursivity Levels, Five Mediations, and Three Domains as the Architecture of Narrative Position — Narrators evolved not to describe worlds, but to make recursively relevant what no longer, or never did, exist in the shared field of perception.
- When Salvation Became Background: Representations of Redemption in Northern Renaissance Paintings, 1434-1445 — In 1434, Christian salvation seemed safe enough to become home decor.
- Why Concert Halls Have Roofs — A Mesopoesis of Music & Architecture
Health
- "AI Psychosis" Studies Don't Measure What They Think They Measure — What Nicholls et al. couldn't see, and how AI systems should actually be trained.
- Algorithmic Affects: How Digital Health Tech Manufactures Unease — How digital health apps can make us feel unwell.
- Beyond Enclosure: Transactive Dualism, Multimediation, and Health in Mexico City — A commentary on Elizabeth Roberts' ethnography of toxicity and living value in working-class Mexico City.
- Can Spiritually Transformative Experiences Be Studied by Counselling Studies, and If So, What For? — Current research on spiritually transformative experiences mistakes a basic ethical obligation for a training gap.
- Case Studies in Unearned Confidence, Part 2: The Disastrous Applications of Bandura’s “Self-efficacy” in Health Research — Fifty years of work on "self-efficacy" collapses like a house of cards.
- Health Across Five Dimensions — How medical technologies mediate health across five dimensions of living.
- Health Value Is What Makes Life Better (Even If You Cannot Measure It) — Two keynotes at UiT The Arctic University of Norway
- Helping the Narrator to Tell a New Story: A Living Value Theory of Narrative-based Therapies — A living value model of why narrative-based therapies work.
- Not Just the Body Keeps the Score: Childhood Developmental Trauma and Recursive-Mediational Fluidity — Trauma doesn't store the past. It forecloses the future.
- Recursive Fluidity Is Mental Health: Why Subjective Experience Cannot Be “Included” at Scale — Reading the Wellcome-funded SUN RISE 2026
- Sexual Trauma in Perinatal Mental Health: A Multimediated Model for Care — Sexual trauma lives as patterned vulnerability across five dimensions. The perinatal period intensifies all five.
- Sitting Together: The First Twelve Thousand Years — Sometimes people enjoy sitting together, for no reason, without goal or purpose. Unbelievable, right?
- The Problem of ‘Recognition’ in Medicine: Reflecting on Bridget Bradley’s Biosolidarity and Emily Mendenhall’s Invisible Illness — Why fighting over diagnoses is fighting over the right to suffer visibly
- The Recursive and the Nonrecursive — Why Kleinman's medical anthropology and DSM-III were founded on the same mistake.
- Two Thresholds: Recursive Descent and the Biomedical Reorganization of the Mesocosm — Biomedical diagnosis deeply reorganizes what people feel, fear, and recognize
- What WHO Can't Capture: The Selective Absorption of Traditional Medicine Into Global Health — Global Health cannot absorb anything from traditional healing that cannot be reformatted into biomedicine.
- When the Best Prescription Is Deprescription — New approaches to managing chronic pain in primary care
- When the Nature/Culture Split Kills Lives — A commentary on the UK's handling of the COVID-19 pandemic
- Why No One Is Lunatic Anymore (And No One Even Noticed): Demediating the Moon From Psychiatry, Law, and Science — No psychiatrist in 2026 checks a lunar calendar before prescribing antipsychotics.
Life Sciences
- "There's No Such Thing as a Gruffalo" — How a picture book reveals the ontology of language, learning, and mind.
- A Living Value Theory of Developmental Psychology — Children do not gradually acquire intelligence, they progressively learn to discern what kind of world they are in.
- A Living Value Theory of Intelligence — The history of intelligence testing is the history of mistaking what can be measured for everything that is intelligent.
- A Living Value Theory of Sleep — LVT has a good night's sleep.
- Bathe Him in the Dew From Lethe’s Stream: A Living Value Theory of Dreaming — We are such stuff as dreams are made on.
- Case Studies in Unearned Confidence: How Psychology Misconstructs "Reading" and "Writing" — All current claims about younger people losing their ability to read or write longer texts because of social media and generative AI are methodologically flawed.
- If an Alien Could Speak, We Couldn't Understand Him: Why Xenolinguistics Cannot Succeed — Why decoding an alien signal would not constitute understanding — and what xenolinguistics has systematically failed to ask.
- Metabolic Recognition as the Ground of All Understanding — "You'll have had your tea."
- Of Hamsters, Dogs, and Peccaries: Recursive Mediational Attributions to Animals — Reading Philippe Descola through LVT.
- Pygmalion in the Classroom: Another Case of Psychology Making Misleading Claims — Another case study in the unearned confidence of psychological measurements.
- Revisiting the Beyond Therapy Report a Quarter of a Century Later: Bioethics, Pharmacological Hype, and the Lost Authority of Expert Culture — Mid drugs. Maxed-out moral panic. Total cringe.
- Strong Microbes, Weak Ontology: Mesocosmic Reach, Recursive Relevance, and the Limits of Latour's Symmetry — Latour spent his entire career circling around the nature/culture binary as the key problem, when actually it was whether an entity mattered to the human mesocosm all along.
- The Birth of the Notation: Why Symbolic Innovation Precedes Experimentation — In modern science, notation comes before experimentation, and these systems of notation have a history independent of the fields using them.
- The Embodied Limits of Peircean Semiotics — Why Peirce's semiotic framework cannot ground a universal theory of meaning in living systems.
- The Genesis of the Five Mediations: A Deep Evolutionary Account of the Human Mesocosm — An essay in honour of Alan Barnard.
- Unearned Confidence: Why Psychology Mass-produces Compelling but Misleading Claims — Psychology will continue to mass-produce pseudoscientific claims as long as it doesn't understand the basic ontology of what it is trying to study.
- Why Culture Exists: Metabolic Stakes and the Multimediated Stabilization of Interrecursivity — An evolutionary answer to the question why humans have "culture" at all.
Social Theory
- "Resonance" Without Recursivity: An LVT Reading of Hartmut Rosa — Why Hartmut Rosa's resonance does not fully vibe with LVT
- A Living Value Theory of My Ex-Partner: Interrecursive Discernment From Henry VIII to Johnny Depp — Why we keep thinking about some previous relationships for many years after the breakup.
- A Sinkhole with Bunting and Brass Band: The Collapse of Putnam's "Social Capital" — The Dude abides. The concept of social capital does not.
- An Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge: Why Social Anthropology No Longer Knows What It Studies — Social anthropology has been moving into Borgesian encyclopedia territory.
- Case Studies in Unearned Confidence, Part 1: Bandura's "Self-Efficacy" as Interrecursive Commitment — LVT has no confidence in individualistic approaches.
- Case Studies in Unearned Confidence: A Critique of Gilbert's Region-Beta Paradox — When psychologists make claims about years of life from a 5-minute experiment, it's never going to be good.
- Concept Work in the Social Sciences: An LVT Perspective — Interrecursive processes are never stable entities.
- Dwelling in the Mesocosm: Retracing Ingold's Path — Where paths are crossing and separating.
- From the Cave to the Algorithm — Any technology is best understood through the stakes that they answered.
- Hartmut Rosa's Situation Und Konstellation in Light of Living Value Theory — LVT watches the FIFA World Cup 2026 with Hartmut Rosa
- How Theories Travel: Recursive Careers, Mesocosmic Reach, and the Lesson of Oppenheimer — Most scientific theories never leave science. The few that do have a very specific profile.
- Interrecursivity: Social Theory’s Missing Concept — Non-recursive domains, selfrecursivity, interrecursivity in living coordinations.
- Lead the Pig-Lamb-Calf Around the Field: A Deep History of the Word "Culture" — The Romans' understanding of "culture" was far better than the Enlightenment redefinition.
- Lucy in the Sky Without Diamonds — Harari's books are overshared fiction.
- Never Enough: How Modern Institutions Destroy the Possibility of Being Done — LVT runs past Hartmut Rosa because nothing was accelerating
- Never Getting Back From Its Head to Its Feet: How Marxist Theory Remained Trapped by Enlightenment Thought — The Enlightenment handed Marx a hopelessly truncated mesocosm, and he never noticed.
- Niklas Luhmann's the Traffic of Society, Or: Why I Can't Drive a Car in Kolkata — LVT recovers a lost manuscript on how traffic traffics.
- No Such Thing as Raw Data — All research methods in the social sciences capture only traces
- The Hail Mary Test (Part 1): Social Theory — No existing social theory survives the Hail Mary Test
- The Hail Mary Test (Part 4): Four-Field American Anthropology — The nature/culture binary could never be resolved
- The Impossible Object: Beyond Social Theory — Why social theory inherited a broken object from the Enlightenment, and why it cannot be repaired from within.
- The Overburdened Category: Why Class No Longer Explains Enough — Why class began as a narrow macroeconomic taxonomy and became one of the most mediationally overloaded concepts in social thought.
- Two Native Points of View: Representation and Stakes — Malinowski's founding charter contained two inseparable demands. Anthropology heard one and left the other waiting.
- Two Thousand Years in the Same Place: The Oechs Family and the Village Cluster of the Offenburg Rhine Plain — Two thousand years against all odds
- What Is a Social Institution? — Conceptualizing social institutions with all the mediations and all recursivity left in.
- What’s Your Opinion? Let Me Know in the Comments — What exactly is an “opinion” in opinion polls?
- Wondering What Others Wonder About: A New History of Anthropological Theory, Methodology, and Pedagogy — A radically new theory of what anthropology as a discipline actually does.
- Zweitausend Jahre Mitsamkeit: Die Familie Oechs in der Offenburger Rheinebene — Zweitausend Jahre gegen alle Widrigkeiten
Power
- "Friction" and the Cost of Partial Ontologies: Clausewitz, Tsing, and the Mesocosm — Clausewitz's friction is more multi-mediated than Tsing's because war leaves no room for incomplete ontologies.
- A Mesocosmology of the Next Pandemic — Four clocks, five mediations.
- Beyond the Panopticon: Architecture as the Multimaterial Mediation of Recursivity — Foucault's take on power and architectural form misses how buildings restructure recursivity.
- Conceptual Justice: A New Framework for Qualitative Research Ethics — Almost all the harm done by qualitative researchers occurs at the stage of conceptualization and publication, not during data collection.
- Da Hakt's: A New Framework for Understanding Recursive Effects — A new framework for analysing coordination failures.
- Die implizite Werttheorie des deutschen Grundgesetzes — Rekursive Mediation oder: warum im deutschen Recht Flüsse niemals Rechtspersönlichkeiten werden können
- From Policing Surfaces to Assessing Competence: Why Universities Are Getting AI Wrong and What They Should Do Instead — Assessment rules have lost touch with students' lived experience.
- How India Came to "Lack History" — LVT takes the liberty to historicize John Stuart Mill's works on India
- Only Recursive Tasks Count: An Ontology of AI Delegation — A new framework for how to distinguish appropriate from inappropriate uses of AI in research, teaching, and learning.
- Predicting Unpredictability: Three Modes of Future Intelligence in Rocky IV — Why the Cold War was won by prediction, not anticipation, and why Rocky IV cannot say so.
- Symbolic Succession: How Legal Philosophy Misrecognized the Grudge Informer Case — How law remakes the past to constitute its own authority in the present.
- Technologies of Power: Mesocosmic Expansion, Incorporation, and Predation — Technology is both about maintaining what is here and expanding into what is over there.
- The Health Card That Could Not Be Eaten: India's RSBY and the Collapse of "Social Capital" — Why Putnam's 'social capital' makes no sense on the ground.
- The Law School That Failed Its Own Midterm Exam — Berkeley Law School's new AI rules revive Lombroso's criminal physiognomy.
- The Suppression of Depression as Multimediation: Psychiatric Diagnoses Under Myanmar's Military Dictatorship — In Myanmar, depression doesn't get diagnosed because it is interpreted as political protest against the dictatorship.
- We Don't Even Know Where Alesia Is: Metabolic Predation and Post-Colonial Silence in Caesar's Gallic War — Asterix and the Chieftain's Shield vs Agamben's Homo Sacer
- What Exactly Are We Decolonizing? — A response to the JRAI dialogues on decolonizing anthropology.
Economics
- AI, Exhaustion, and the Productivity Myth — Current models of productivity no longer account for work.
- Beneath Real Utopias: Erik Olin Wright and the Question of What Makes Institutions Livable — LVT or Wright? Comparing Wright's critique of capitalism to LVT's approach to economics.
- Class: What Critical Theory Thinks It Is, and What It Actually Is — Class is less about competition than about reading others (and letting oneself be read).
- Die Wolfsburg-Krise: Strukturanalyse und strategische Maßnahmen — A critical friend's return visit
- Of Garage Sales and Free Pianos — How Mauss's gift/commodity binary misled anthropology for a century.
- Platforms, Legibility, and the Quiet Reorganisation of the Mesocosm — Platforms do not extract from users. Attention is not a scarce resource. Platforms monetise mesocosmic recoordination.
- Robert Shiller’s Narrative Economics as Ontological Failure — Why narratives come last, not first.
- The Hail Mary Test for Economics — Scarcity, survival, and the collapse of transaction
- Value Is What Makes Life Better (Even If You Cannot Measure It)
- Value Without Trace: Recursivity, the Mesocosm, and the Limits of Symbolization — Rethinking branding, work, and value.