Not in the obvious sense, not geography or landscape, though those do really matter to me. I mean place in a deeper sense. The kind of place that calls something out of you. That addresses you. That leaves you changed in ways you didn’t anticipate and can’t entirely explain.

Place, in this sense, is foundational to everything I’m trying to do philosophically. If Logontology has a starting point, it’s here - in the conviction that we are not isolated minds surveying a neutral world, but beings who are always already situated, always already in relation to something that exceeds us. We become who we are through encounter with what is genuinely other. And encounter requires place.

Which got me thinking about where we spend most of our time now.

The internet presents itself as a place. We speak of online spaces, digital communities, virtual worlds. The language of place is so natural, so unreflective, that the question barely surfaces.

But I think it is a question worth challenging.

Marc Augé coined the term non-place for the transit zones of supermodernity: airports, motorways, hotel corridors. Spaces defined not by relation or history or identity, but by passage and transaction. A non-place doesn’t know you. It processes you.

The internet, I suggest in the video, is the perfection of the non-place. And that matters. Because if it is, then we are spending enormous portions of our lives in a space that cannot address us. That has no depth to disclose. That returns to us, with increasing algorithmic precision, nothing but our own reflection.

And you cannot become in a mirror.

This is the argument I explore in the new video - drawing on Augé, on Graham Harman’s notion of the withdrawn object, and on Nishida’s concept of Basho, to ask whether the internet meets the threshold of genuine place. Whether it can disclose, or whether it can only reflect.

I think the answer matters beyond philosophy. If we are beings who become through genuine encounter with otherness, then a world increasingly saturated with reflection rather than disclosure is not just culturally impoverishing. It is, in the deepest sense, a threat to becoming itself.

The video is here. I’d love to know what you think.

There is a library inside every human life - inherited before we can read, added to constantly, and largely composed of the same book rewritten. The human narrative recycles itself with every generation. We swim in it without noticing, looking for balance in a system that structurally cannot provide it.

My latest YouTube video is about a camping trip in the Lake District, about going outside with a notebook, and about the difference between becoming a footnote and becoming soil.

The video ends with a poem I wrote that weekend. I hope it leaves you, even briefly, at the threshold. I’ll put the poem below.

Camping

i.

Camping
is an idea,
a damp nylon, grassy-green,
bun and frankfurter,
chilly night with shared
ablutions,
kind of idea.

We are,
to the hill we're pegged against,
a fly's tickle,
an irritation to be
suffered,
a noise.

ii.

We dissolve
like cubes of sugar
into
the coffee-coloured night
leaving trails
of unsettled sweetness
as we try to sleep.

iii.

Tired,
we walk to the top
of Helm Crag
and feel
conquered,
as we become
children
to a single moment
of
easiness.

I was living in the French Alps when it happened. A little house on a mountain. The kind of place that should, by any reasonable measure, have made life feel extraordinary. The kind of place people spend years trying to get to.

I opened a book and read a short sentence in the introduction.

Man is a thinking monkey.

The writer meant it lightly. A cheerful shorthand for what we are: animals who evolved the capacity for complex thought, wandering a universe that didn’t arrange itself for our benefit and doesn’t much notice our presence. Nothing malicious. Just honest.

And something in me collapsed…

And then atheism crept up on me. When it came it was sharp. It had a disturbing clarity. The world is what it is, matter and motion, and the religious instinct is a mistake – useful once, but now a distraction. I could see the argument. It seemed, for a while, a very short while, to be the grown-up position.

But that didn’t hold either.

I don’t think it was because I needed the comfort of believing. That explanation – that religious people believe because they can’t face the alternative – always struck me as condescending. It mistakes a preference for consolation, which some people do have, for a need that everyone must have, which is quite different. I wasn’t afraid of a universe without God – although that was a bleak thought. I was just not convinced that such a universe existed.

The problem was with what atheism was so certain it had disposed of.

The materialist picture: everything reducible to physical process, consciousness a late arrival and possibly an illusion, meaning a human projection onto a fundamentally meaningless substrate… These ideas kept running into the same difficulty. The materialist picture couldn’t account for itself. The moment you take seriously the claim that all mental events are simply brain events, you’ve undermined the reasoning that got you there. The argument erases its own foundation.

I’m not making a case for God. Not yet. I’m just noting that the confident dismissal of the question seemed to require a kind of selective inattention that I found, in its own way, as unsatisfying as the religion it replaced.

So I was in between. Which is uncomfortable, but also, I think, honest.

The space between is not nothing. It’s where the interesting questions live. Questions that religion once held but often stopped asking, and that atheism considers answered but hasn’t actually answered. Questions like: why is there something rather than nothing? What is consciousness, really? Is meaning something we make, or something we find, or some third thing that the made/found distinction can’t quite capture? What does it mean to say that something matters?

These are not questions with obvious answers. But they’re also not questions you can simply set aside. They keep coming back. They’re what philosophy has always been trying to get at.

Logontology is, in part, my attempt to stay in that space without flinching.

The world is not a fixed thing with a fixed explanation. It is an unfolding. And we are part of the unfolding. We aren’t spectators, we’re not consumers of meaning, but participants in a process that is genuinely open, genuinely unfinished.

That’s where I started. Dissatisfied, unconvinced, and attentive.

It turned out to be enough to move on with.

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The video is called What is Logontology? It runs to about ten minutes and covers the ground I find myself returning to again and again: why reality is better understood as process than as furniture; what it means to say that consciousness is a place rather than a thing; why meaning lives between people rather than inside them; and why I think our limitedness – the fact that we are mortal, particular, and running out of time – is not the tragedy but the whole point.

It also begins, as most things I write begin, with a question I couldn’t put down when I was young and haven’t managed to put down since.

I’d be glad to know what you think – either here or over on the channel. And if Logontology is new to you, this is probably the right place to start.

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At that stage, the world feels like a puzzle waiting to be solved.

Idealism grows naturally from this impulse. We begin to suspect that beneath the surface of appearances there must be a deeper order - a perfect logic, a metaphysical structure, a final explanation that, if discovered, would make sense of everything. Philosophy becomes a search for that hidden foundation. Religion promises it. Metaphysics promises it. Even science sometimes appears to promise it.

The idealist believes that somewhere there must be a system that explains the whole.

But life has a way of complicating such hopes.

The years pass. Experience accumulates. One begins to notice that every system leaves something out. Every theory explains some things well but struggles with others. The world resists neat conceptual containment.

Even the greatest thinkers disagree.

One philosopher claims that reality is mind. Another that it is matter. Another that it is process. Another that it is language. Each position has its elegance, its arguments, its internal coherence - and yet none seems capable of closing the question once and for all.

Gradually a quiet suspicion emerges.

Perhaps the task of philosophy is not to solve reality.

Perhaps it is to help us live within it.

This is where pragmatism begins to enter the picture.

Pragmatism does not necessarily reject the insights of idealism. Rather, it changes the orientation of thought. Instead of asking, What is the final structure of reality, the pragmatist asks a different question:

What helps us navigate experience well?

Truth becomes less like a distant treasure buried beneath the universe and more like a tool that helps us move through the world. Ideas are not valuable only because they are logically perfect. They are valuable because they illuminate experience, guide action, deepen understanding, and open new possibilities for living.

In this way, pragmatism is not a retreat from philosophy but a maturation of it.

It acknowledges something that long reflection eventually reveals: reality is inexhaustible. No system can fully capture it. Every conceptual framework is partial, provisional, and revisable.

But this does not make thought meaningless.

Quite the opposite.

Thought becomes an instrument of participation rather than domination. Instead of trying to master reality from above, we learn to engage with it from within.

The shift from idealism to pragmatism therefore reflects a deeper philosophical humility.

The idealist often imagines that philosophy will culminate in a final view - a completed map of existence. The pragmatist suspects that philosophy is more like a set of evolving maps, each drawn from a particular vantage point, each useful for certain journeys but none able to represent the whole terrain.

And perhaps this is not a failure.

Perhaps it is simply the nature of being alive within a world that is richer than any theory.

When we adopt a pragmatic attitude, we become less obsessed with winning metaphysical debates and more interested in how ideas shape the quality of lived experience. The question shifts from Which system is absolutely correct? to Which perspective helps us see more clearly, act more wisely, and live more fully?

In this way philosophy returns to its original task.

Not the construction of intellectual monuments, but the cultivation of wisdom.

The pragmatist still values truth, still seeks understanding, still engages deeply with philosophical traditions. But there is less anxiety about finding the final answer. Instead there is a growing appreciation for the process of inquiry itself.

Ideas become companions in the journey rather than final destinations.

And perhaps this is where philosophy finally comes home - to the lived world from which it began.

The mountains, the conversations, the books on the shelf, the quiet moments of reflection, the unexpected insights that arrive while walking or writing. These experiences resist complete explanation, yet they are precisely where meaning emerges.

The idealist sought the ultimate theory.

The pragmatist discovers that the world itself is already enough to think with.

And that may be the most liberating realisation of all.

Anyway

I’ve been reading Ryokan’s poetry today. I also stumbled across the poetry of Ovid and his The Art of Love. I then began to compare Eros to Agape. We live balanced between the two. The world needs both and so do we. Apparently Dante’s Divine Comedy is seen as the ultimate synthesis of the two. I’m going to have to read that epic poem.

Here’s the poem I write today.

Unreachable

God is unreachable.
Your body 
is an arm’s length away.

You are my empty church
your flesh has life, warming
the cold stone sermons
we speak.

The hut’s roof lets in rain,
the bamboo door whistles
and the chimney is demanding a brush.

Our bones creak in winter.

But not to love
would be 
unforgivable, 

a sin.

So, let’s light the fire, 
now,

and make the unreachable 

smile again.

Today’s photo was taken last year when I was out walking in the Lake District. I write a lot when I’m there as it’s such an inspiring place.

Here’s a poem I scribbled down in my notebook while walking in the Lakes.

The Path

You see, 
we need the path -

no good nor evil there
just a way through.

Life is the challenge -
our time under the sun.

The prints we leave behind 
in dust and snow, is the purpose.
To be pulled towards beauty, 
to love for love's sake,

to touch 
because there's something to touch.

This is the path.

And here’s a nice wintery photo I took (the next day) in the village.

Window-Framed Wild

There’s snow on the road,
the hills,

rooftops.

There’s a wind-swept landscape
window-framed
where a dozen crows warm their feet
on chimneys.

Winter 
was forecast. The larder 
is full.

Trying to survive the cold,
a sparrow
hunts the crumb, the berry –

anything 
is everything
to the keen eye
of a small beak.

There’s nothing I’ll scrawl here,
that’ll put me out there – boots, scarf,
gloves, a weatherproof coat…

I feel composed,
anchoured.

The clock’s knitting a cardigan
of sharp sounds, 
a cinnamon roll warms my thoughts, 
a whippet sleeps, 
screens flicker.

I have more than I need
and a window,
to hold me this warm side
of a wind-swept
wild. 

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I also went for walk with Kitty (the whippet) and my camera. The view below was taken from the walk which begins just behind the cottage.

Fibered Noise

The ease at which this fibered noise
clings to the page,
astounds me.

You’d think some knitting would begin,
that some missed words
might just fall from the polyphony
of genius marching across my bookshelf,
and knit themselves into a ball-point pen-
warmer for my unfeeling ink. 

There’s so much told to be 
unspun, to be
re-
produced,
planted in the fibered field of lines I have 
before me. I feel queasy at the thought. I feel
like a pilgrim on a long journey

to the kitchen, where freshly-baked scones 
and a jar of jam,
might just find a way of saying
the very whatever it is I haven’t yet said.