(Acosta et al., 2025) In his essay “How Digital Technology Can Be Used to Exploit and Manipulate Emotions It Cannot Feel,” Robert Hanna argues against the “AI resurrection” industry by pointing out that it’s rationally unjustified and immoral to use not only people’s obsession with guns and gun violence, but also their false belief in … [continue reading]

Original poster art for Gun Crazy, directed by Joseph H. Lewis (1950) In “Gun Crazy: A Moral Argument for Gun Abolitionism,” Robert Hanna argues that not only (i) owning, carrying, and/or using guns, but also (ii) The 2nd Amendment to the US Constitution, and (iii) their necessary consequence, gun violence, are all rationally unjustified and … [continue reading]

(Spicer and Roulet, 2014a) In “The End of Peer Review and The Matrix of Ideas,” Robert Hanna argues that peer review is not only (i) an effective straitjacket that massively stifles creativity and guarantees in-crowd orthodoxy, but also (ii) an effective bottleneck that massively slows down and chokes the dissemination and sharing of creative unorthodox … [continue reading]

In his essay, “WTFU: The Manifesto of The Nobodies,” Robert Hanna tells us that “WTFU,” pronounced “what-foo,” means wake the fuck up: and that that’s what he’s urging us all to do in this manifesto. Kantians and others will have already recognized that WTFU is a pithy, pungent contemporary equivalent of Immanuel Kant’s famous or … [continue reading]

(Wong, 2016) In his essay, “Higher Education Without Commodification, Mechanization, or Moralization,” Robert Hanna asks the question: what is the ultimate end of higher education? Giambattista Vico, echoing Socrates’s Delphic oracle, claimed that the ultimate end of all education is self-knowledge. Hanna fully agrees with Vico’s claim, but also wants radically to extend his idea … [continue reading]

(Blitzway, 2026) The doctrine of strong artificial intelligence says that the operations of digital computing systems or digital technology can equal or exceed the achievements of conscious, rational human animals. In “On the Impossibility of Kantbots” Robert Hanna argues against the thesis of strong artificial intelligence by demonstrating the impossibility of what he calls Kantbots, … [continue reading]

(Costa-Gavras, 1969) An earlier and exclusively online version of the essay, “Philosophical Rigor as Rigor Mortis, Or, How to Write a Publishable Paper Without Even Having to Think,” was written and published in 2015 by  the pseudonymous independent philosopher Z (aka, Robert Hanna), hence it appeared roughly five years prior to the “invasion of the … [continue reading]

“Whitehall From Charing Cross” (ca. 1899) by Herbert Menzies Marshall (Leithauser, 2021) In his essay “Philosophy and ‘A Complete Appreciation of the Usual’,” Robert Hanna begins with Henry James’s insightful remark that Anthony Trollope’s “great … [and] inestimable merit” as a novelist was “a complete appreciation of the usual.” By “the usual,” in this context, … [continue reading]

Figure 1: The Cosmic Rubber Sheet Torus (Wikimedia, 2012) Figure 2: (Coughlin et al., 2018) In “Space and Place” Robert Hanna asks the question “what is the nature of space?,” and answers it in terms of (i) Kant’s theory of the transcendental ideality of space, (ii) our representation of egocentrically-centered place, which grounds our representation … [continue reading]