Current Writings
Von Neumann’s Party. Nature. October 2, 2026. (free link)
The Story Behind the Story. Nature. October 2, 2026 (free link)
Forthcoming Books
The Philosophy of Hats (under review)
Einstein was not the only brainy physicist who wore a hat. The hat exists in a tight inverse relationship to the human head. A hat is not just in the vicinity of the brain and its electric power, the hat enjoys an intense bond with the head itself. The head fills in the hat just as the hat fills out the head. We cannot forget its location, unique among all our clothing and accessories. Ultimately, the hat is a head ornament, a collaboration between head and hat, an intellectual adventure.
Philosopher’s Cup: The Book of Tea (under review)
Tea is not a mathematical problem. When we labor to make tea a difficult equation we mistake our own mental confusion with tea. In the universe of tea, the problem is already solved. That is why we speak of tea as a tautology. Tea is tea. Tea is the book, not the book about books.
Papers in Progress
What Turing Didn’t Know (paper in preparation)
Knowledge, Ignorance and Stupidity (paper in preparation)
Why AI Plays Games: Boards, Players and Rules in Computation (paper in preparation)
Current Research
Foundational Epistemology of AI | Time | Philosophical Theology | Logic | Mind & Hand | Philosophy of Language | Philosophy of Mind | The Concept of a Person | Unique Brain | Asian Philosophy | C.S. Peirce | Philosophy of Materials (Tea, Hats) | Architectural Theory | Knowledge Classification Systems | Al-Biruni
Philosophical Training
While my university philosophical training began early with a course in Buddhism at 16, my extensive philosophy training at Guilford College included being the only philosophy graduate in 1976, the first ever Honors in Philosophy and having 7 philosophy professors in 4 years. The most intense class was with a young John E. Cooley, newly arrived Ph.D. from UCLA’s famed Logic Group. One simple line will explain the intensity of that education.
Me → John E. Cooley → Richard Montague → Alfred Tarski
I had the great fortune to learn aesthetics with a Ph.D. student at UNC-Chapel Hill named Howard Passell who quickly became a good friend and shared his enthusiasm for Charles Sanders Peirce. He got me hooked. When I tried to do my Honors Thesis my department chairman felt no one at Guilford could supervise the thesis so he okayed me doing it under Richard Smyth, a Peirce scholar at Chapel Hill who gladly spent his Wednesday afternoons for a year tutoring me personally in Peirce. Another grand education. As graduate director of philosophy at Chapel Hill, we discussed moving there for a PhD. I was only 20 and he felt it would take 3 years since he considered my last undergraduate to be equal to first year Ph.D. work. When I had the opportunity to go to Princeton, then the home of a stellar philosophy department, he encouraged me to go there and to study all the fields offered by Princeton Theological Seminary.
I moved to PTS for three years of graduate work and quickly attached to Diogenes Allen, a student of Austin Farrer and the analytical philosophers at Oxford, and I took every course he offered earning my only B in over 20 lifetime philosophy courses, of course in Kant. (Having Scottish blood, I prefer Hume.) I also attended lectures at the Philosophy Department at Princeton University which then included Saul Kripke, Richard Rorty, Walter Kaufmann, David Lewis, Thomas Nagel, Thomas Kuhn and others. The environment was charged.
Some of my best education came from scholars in diverse fields: William “Billy” Shellman in Architecture, Horton Davies in Religious Art and Architecture, Bruce Metzger in multiple New Testament courses, Seward Hiltner in Psychology, Jürgen Moltmann, C.S. Song and James Cone in Theology. James I. McCord personally convinced me to stay when I grew disillusioned and wanted to change over to the University. He was right that I was free to pursue my own mind at PTS in many fields at once. And I wound up with more coursework in philosophy than most PhDs in philosophy.
Years later, I would return as a DuPont Fellow to University of Virginia’s Ph.D. program but I had too many intervening years with too much study and writing to return as a graduate student. I resigned in good standing and returned to writing film scripts in Hollywood, that industry that requires a philosopher to dust off his books on Stoicism.
The logic of Frege, Russell, Tarski and Montague never left my mind and the philosophy continued in different forms.