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Brice Cummings

@abcummings.bsky.social
2.6K followers 984 following 612 posts

~ notes toward an existentially aware philosophy of education ~ renaissanceanimal.com

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Brice Cummings @abcummings.bsky.social · 01/08/2026
One of the bears of Queen Wilhelmina State Park decided to allow himself to be perceived (but I didn't have my phone camera handy). The park's name, incidentally, dates back to an 1898 failed attempt by Dutch railroad investors to get the Netherlands queen to visit Arkansas
A Ouachita mountain valley, looking down from Rich Mountain Bear warning
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Brice Cummings @abcummings.bsky.social · 01/08/2026
The Barnes & Noble history section can be hit-or-miss, but in this case Neil Price's _Children of Ash and Elm_ offers a thoughtful interpretation of the "Viking" phenomenon from the point of view of an anthropological archaeologist
Book: Neil Price, Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings
Background: The Ouachitas coffee / brewery, (Mena, Arkansas) early on a Saturday morning
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Brice Cummings @abcummings.bsky.social · 31/07/2026
A hike to Little Missouri Falls, in Ouachita National Forest
Little Missouri Falls, Ouachita National Forest, western Arkansas yellow wildflowersrockstream
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Brice Cummings @abcummings.bsky.social · 30/07/2026
"but are pleased when their works are approved of, without being either much vexed or very angry when they are neglected." 4/6
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Brice Cummings @abcummings.bsky.social · 30/07/2026
"They are almost always men of the most amiable simplicity of manners, who live in good harmony with one another, are the friends of one another’s reputation, enter into no intrigue in order to secure the public applause," 3/6
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Brice Cummings @abcummings.bsky.social · 30/07/2026
"Mathematicians and natural philosophers, from their independency upon the public opinion, have little temptation to form themselves into factions and cabals, either for the support of their own reputation, or for the depression of that of their rivals." 2/6
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Brice Cummings @abcummings.bsky.social · 08/07/2026
This is Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge. The refuge is a beautiful, unique place, home to animals and birds found nowhere in the USA outside the Rio Grande Valley, and to some of my best memories. Yet this treasure is being destroyed because of malice, hatred, and stupidity.
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Brice Cummings @abcummings.bsky.social · 08/07/2026
Please call your Congresspeople and ask that they put a stop to the border-wall-fueled destruction of Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge.
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Brice Cummings @abcummings.bsky.social · 08/07/2026
www.valleycentral.com/video/land-p...
valleycentral.com
Land preparations started for border wall at Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge | Border Report Live
Land preparations started for border wall at Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge | Border Report Live
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Brice Cummings @abcummings.bsky.social · 08/07/2026
This is Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge. The refuge is a beautiful, unique place, home to animals and birds found nowhere in the USA outside the Rio Grande Valley, and to some of my best memories. Yet this treasure is being destroyed because of malice, hatred, and stupidity.
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Brice Cummings @abcummings.bsky.social · 06/07/2026
New book out by Thomas Zigal, potentially of interest to any number of folks who have encountered its subject's archive of video lectures out somewhere in the wilds of the Internet
Rick Roderick
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Brice Cummings @abcummings.bsky.social · 04/07/2026
Independent wildlife
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Brice Cummings @abcummings.bsky.social · 04/07/2026
Happy 4th!
Herzlich willkommenHopkins County Courthouse Sulphur SpringsSulphur Springs
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Brice Cummings @abcummings.bsky.social · 29/06/2026
Well now I'm curious: How many Peabody Ducks would Elvis weigh on Jupiter?
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Brice Cummings @abcummings.bsky.social · 26/06/2026
Thanks for writing an eminently worthwhile book; given the challenges facing the institutional humanities at the moment, we need more like it!
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Brice Cummings @abcummings.bsky.social · 26/06/2026
Okay, it took me awhile, but I finally got around to reviewing @profstorm.bsky.social's new book:
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Brice Cummings @abcummings.bsky.social · 26/06/2026
Critiquing Genealogy and Genealogizing Critique: A Storm Breaks over Nietzsche and Foucault Review: Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm, The Genealogy of Genealogy: Nietzsche, Foucault, and the Coils of Critical History (University of Chicago Press, 2026). Reading Friedrich Nietzsche in good faith is a…
renaissanceanimal.com
Critiquing Genealogy and Genealogizing Critique: A Storm Breaks over Nietzsche and Foucault
Review: Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm, The Genealogy of Genealogy: Nietzsche, Foucault, and the Coils of Critical History (University of Chicago Press, 2026). Reading Friedrich Nietzsche in good faith is a little like gambling for charity—it’s arguably a betrayal of the art form. If you want a good-faith reading of how one of Nietzsche’s various metaphors for his technique of roguishly insightful but maliciously suspicious reading—his “genealogy”—was transmuted into a default methodology for so-called “poststructuralist” cultural studies by acolytes of Michel Foucault, I recommend Michael Mahon’s 1992…
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Brice Cummings @abcummings.bsky.social · 20/06/2026
As far as book titles go, this one has some ambition
Roger Penrose, The Road to Reality
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Brice Cummings @abcummings.bsky.social · 19/06/2026
World Cup vibes
Mexico v. South Korea watch party
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Brice Cummings @abcummings.bsky.social · 16/06/2026
"In the modern consciousness, it is the narcissistically humbling recognition of our basic finitude, dictating that being and consciousness can never fully coincide, that entails the inescapable requirement for critique." ~ Benjamin Boysen & Jesper Lundsfryd Rasmussen (eds.)
Against New Materialisms (book cover)
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Brice Cummings @abcummings.bsky.social · 01/06/2026
a squirrel sits down and has a think
squirrel planks on seat squirrel ponders the meaning of existence squirrel has idea for Being and Nuts
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Brice Cummings @abcummings.bsky.social · 01/06/2026
I have good news, I was in a Dallas gas station and they were selling beer with the help of a life-size AI-generated cardboard figure of Leo Messi in a USMNT kit
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Brice Cummings @abcummings.bsky.social · 31/05/2026
Thank you, this is indeed very helpful. I appreciate your time!
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Brice Cummings @abcummings.bsky.social · 30/05/2026
If you don't want to respond in public, I understand; I only just now realized I wasn't already following you (am now) & so can't send a message. Mostly I'm just trying to get a sense for how what you're advocating (in Metamodernism) or critiquing (In G. of G.) cashes out when applied to a 3rd party
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Brice Cummings @abcummings.bsky.social · 30/05/2026
...I was wondering if you saw Sauer's project as more of the kind of genealogy you are (lovingly, if severely) critiquing or (given its science-adjacent method) if you see it as more of a hylosemiotic "joyful positivism," despite its genealogical shape...
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Brice Cummings @abcummings.bsky.social · 30/05/2026
Okay @profstorm.bsky.social , I do have a question: Have you by any chance read Hanno Sauer's The Invention of Good and Evil: A World History of Morality? It seems to me like the closest thing anyone has written in the 21st C. to Nietzsche's OG Genealogy of Morals, and ...
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Brice Cummings @abcummings.bsky.social · 29/05/2026
It's a real problem haha
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Brice Cummings @abcummings.bsky.social · 29/05/2026
Utterly quotidien archaeological objects (like bags) bring you closer to past lives than do, say, statues of the conquerors you'd (hopefully) never have met even had you lived then. Here's a 6,000-year-old prairie dog bag for corn and a deerhide bag for pumpkin seeds. (Oklahoma Museum of History)
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Brice Cummings @abcummings.bsky.social · 27/05/2026
Thanks!
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Brice Cummings @abcummings.bsky.social · 25/05/2026
the dig site at Waco Mammoth National Monument
adult female mammoth skeleton adult male mammoth skeleton some kind of ancient turtle skeleton being reconstructed on a work bench mammoth bone
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Ben Wurgaft @benwurgaft.bsky.social · 24/05/2026
writing about intellectual history without politics being your ultimate horizon of concern
An image of a caterpillar in a jar, dead.
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Brice Cummings @abcummings.bsky.social · 23/05/2026
Interesting take on Foucault's Nietzsche (& more ambitiously, on what Storm takes to have been the default stance toward history in the humanities / critical theory / cultural studies - excluding history proper - since c. 1970). I'll probably write a review of The Genealogy of Genealogy next week.
JAJ Storm The Genealogy of Genealogy
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Brice Cummings @abcummings.bsky.social · 15/05/2026
Emily Herring's intriguing essay draws parallels between the poets of 1830s French Romanticism and the problems of 2020s Generation Z. aeon.co/essays/young...
aeon.co
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João Ohara @oharajrm.com · 12/05/2026
In October, I will host a virtual workshop on current approaches to the theory and philosophy of history. The idea is to discuss various approaches to the field and its methodological and metaphilosophical commitments. CFP linked. #philsky #philsci #philhist philevents.org/event/show/1...
philevents.org
Understanding Current Approaches to the Theory and Philosophy of History
“Theory and philosophy of history” is a contested label for a loosely connected set of research agendas about history (in the sense of our more or less systematic ways of studying the huma...
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Brice Cummings @abcummings.bsky.social · 14/05/2026
Ding Dong Review of Books
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Brice Cummings @abcummings.bsky.social · 10/05/2026
North Texas gets a bad rap for not having the towering mountain peaks or lush verdant woodlands of regions further west or east, but every pocket prairie is stunning throughout April and May
Wildflower (fluffy cauliflower-esque)Firewheel Firewheels and daisies Firewheels and daisies
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Brice Cummings @abcummings.bsky.social · 25/04/2026
Texas' newest state park, in the northernmost stretch of the Hill Country (Palo Pinto County)
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Brice Cummings @abcummings.bsky.social · 24/04/2026
(from Kwame Anthony Appiah's new book Captive Gods: Religion and the Rise of Social Science) *In defense of the early-20th-century professoriate, technically Max Weber was on an extended mental health leave from actual university teaching at the time
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Brice Cummings @abcummings.bsky.social · 24/04/2026
"Before social media, academia was more civil and scholars didn't get into so many stupid fights." Eminent sociologists in 1912:
Max Weber almost fights a saber duel
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Brice Cummings @abcummings.bsky.social · 24/04/2026
Sure, but in U.S. philosophy grad students are pushed toward trendy topics - or more accurately, topics that will not be trendy anymore by graduation - and so finish with neither the deep knowledge of hist. of phil. needed to avoid reinventing the wheel nor a currently competitive research pipeline
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Brice Cummings @abcummings.bsky.social · 21/04/2026
"Tolstoy’s phrase 'the snare of preparation,' which he insists we spread before the feet of young people, hopelessly entangling them in a curious inactivity at the very period of life when they are longing to construct the world anew and to conform it to their own ideals."
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Brice Cummings @abcummings.bsky.social · 21/04/2026
"Perhaps nothing is so fraught with significance as the human hand....." - Jane Addams And of course college students are in the best position to appreciate the titular concern of Addams's chapter, which alludes to...
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Brice Cummings @abcummings.bsky.social · 21/04/2026
My students have always had lively debates after reading the chapter "The Snare of Preparation" from Jane Addams's book Twenty Years at Hull House: archive.org/details/twen...
archive.org
twenty years at hull-house : hane adams : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
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Brice Cummings @abcummings.bsky.social · 14/04/2026
Interesting intellectual history or genealogy of the intertwined development of "religion" and "society" as explananda / explanantia c. 1890-1910 in the work of Tylor, Durkheim, Simmel, and Webber.
Kwame Anthony Appiah, Captive Gods: Religion and the Rise of Social Science (Yale University Press, 2025)
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Joseph Lewczak (Truth Seeker) @truthseeker59.bsky.social · 09/04/2026
This painting, a 1927 piece by the Swiss-German artist Paul Klee, is called Limits of Reason (also known as Grenzen des Verstandes, or The Bounds of the Intellect).
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Brice Cummings @abcummings.bsky.social · 09/04/2026
"At present, however, we are a long way from there, though we fancy that we stand on its border: for what I know of a thing is only an external and detached symbol thereof, wrapped in a different arbitrary symbol." ~ J.G. Herder, Ideas for the Philosophy of the History of Mankind, tr. G.M. Moore
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Brice Cummings @abcummings.bsky.social · 09/04/2026
"If we thought with things instead of abstract marks, and expressed the nature of these things instead of arbitrary signs: then farewell to error and opinion, for we should find ourselves in the land of truth."
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Brice Cummings @abcummings.bsky.social · 08/04/2026
Increasingly essential reading: editions.flammarion.com/le-monde-con...
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Brice Cummings @abcummings.bsky.social · 05/04/2026
Happy Easter!
Yellow wildflowers Ladybug TreesGazebo
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Brice Cummings @abcummings.bsky.social · 05/04/2026
Project Hail Mary (film): Ok let's cut from the book narrative 90% of the biology, 99% of the math, & 99.7% of the chemistry, then focus on how STEM PhDs teaching middle school have a questionable sense of humor, have probably eaten more ramen than is good for them, & can't find any (human) friends
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