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Start with the question you actually have.
Choose a question and its compressed argument appears here. Read the path only when you want the manuscript passages that establish and defend it.
This is not an attempt to tell you what to believe.
The work collected here is an attempt to put the models I use to understand the world into contact with the world itself: with experience, history, other people, inherited traditions, evidence, contradiction, and consequences. If a model cannot survive that contact, I would rather lose the model than protect it. Any account that required you to accept it because I had asserted it would contradict the account itself.
It is also not a system presented as complete. A proposition detached from the questions that produced it, the distinctions it depends on, and the consequences that test it can become almost the opposite of what it was meant to say. But completeness creates another problem. If every idea must be received in the order I discovered or wrote it, the reader is asked to encounter answers before the corresponding questions have become real for them. Sequence can preserve an argument while destroying receptivity to it.
That is why this takes the shape it does. You can read continuously, but you do not have to. You can enter through a question, follow an idea backward to what it depends on, follow it forward into what it changes, leave one book for another, or stop when a line of thought no longer seems fruitful. The surrounding metatext is there to expose relationships that ordinary pages tend to hide, not to tell you which relationships you must accept.
This is not a catechism, a proof of possession, or a demand for agreement. It is not meant to replace your judgment with mine. Nor is it an attempt to make every part of the work equally useful to every reader.
Take what clarifies something. Test what seems doubtful. Follow what becomes interesting. Leave aside what does not survive contact with your own experience and judgment.
The point is not that you arrive where I did. The point is that the ideas get a fair encounter with reality — including yours.
Choose a question and its compressed argument appears here. Read the path only when you want the manuscript passages that establish and defend it.