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Notes from the Crawl Room employs the lens and methods of horror writing to critique the excesses and absurdities of philosophy. Each story reveals disastrous and de-humanising effects of philosophies that are separated from real, lived experience (e.g. the absurdity of arguing over a sentence in Kant while the world burns around us). From a Kafkaesque exploration of administrative absurdities to the horrors of discursive violence, white supremacy and the living spectres of patriarchy, A.M. Moskovitz doesn't shy away from addressing the complex aspects of our lives. In addition to offering often humourous critiques of philosophy, these works are also, somewhat ironically, pieces of philosophy themselves. Each story seeks to move a subject area forward offering the reader the capacity to think through ideas in a weirder and more open way than traditional philosophy usually allows.
An antidote to philosophy that seeks to close down and shut off the imaginative potential of human thought,
Notes from the Crawl Room revels in the unsettling and creative potential of stories for revealing what thinking philosophically might really mean.
List of contents
Introductory Essay: Uroborotic Horror
by Susan K. Lang1. The Ring of Gyges
2. Cousin Vincent
3. By which we learn that "Snow is white"
4. Empty Man I: The German Logician (1902)
5. The Gravesend Institute
6. A Response to C.D. Baird's Reading of the Pitwell Phenomenon
7. Empty Man II: Theodore (1999)
8. Bare Substrata
9. such brittle bodies
10. Empty Man III: Marcia (2010)
11. The Locked Room
12. Campus Rumpus I-V
13. The Master's Delight
14. Cloakroom, 1984
15. Empty Man IV: Abbie (2018)
16. Mycorrhizae
17. A Manifesto for Horror As Critique of Analytic Philosophy
Appendix I: Recurring Characters
Appendix II: Quotations
Select Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Credits
About the author
A.M. Moskovitz
Summary
Notes from the Crawl Room employs the lens and methods of horror writing to critique the excesses and absurdities of philosophy. Each story reveals disastrous and de-humanising effects of philosophies that are separated from real, lived experience (e.g. the absurdity of arguing over a sentence in Kant while the world burns around us). From a Kafkaesque exploration of administrative absurdities to the horrors of discursive violence, white supremacy and the living spectres of patriarchy, A.M. Moskovitz doesn't shy away from addressing the complex aspects of our lives. In addition to offering often humourous critiques of philosophy, these works are also, somewhat ironically, pieces of philosophy themselves. Each story seeks to move a subject area forward offering the reader the capacity to think through ideas in a weirder and more open way than traditional philosophy usually allows.
An antidote to philosophy that seeks to close down and shut off the imaginative potential of human thought, Notes from the Crawl Room revels in the unsettling and creative potential of stories for revealing what thinking philosophically might really mean.
Foreword
A striking collection of interconnected stories which use horror to critique the absurdities of philosophy.
Additional text
These uncanny stories of philosophical horror surprise, delight and perplex. Notes from the Crawl Room is at once a warning of what happens when the philosophical impulse is taken too far, and a reminder of how seductive that impulse can be.
