About the Henwell

“You see, if it were not a palace, but a hen-house, I might creep into it to avoid getting wet, and yet I would not call the hen-house a palace out of gratitude to it for keeping me dry. You laugh and say that in such circumstances a hen-house is as good as a mansion. Yes, I answer, if one had to live simply to keep out of the rain.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from the Underground

“Therefore we would like to keep the term ‘metaphysics’ free from all its historical associations. For us it refers only to that activity during which one is particularly in danger of falling into the well.”

— Martin Heidegger, What is a Thing?

By the end of my first year as a graduate student in philosophy I felt I still had little idea what philosophy was in any useful sense, and also that studying and trying to write philosohpy was a very strange way to spend the majority of one's time. Along the way I've also come across a lot of things - ideas, theories, analogies, music, words - that I thought were interesting, sometimes interesting enough to feel that studying philosophy made sense after all. The Henwell is the blog I started, both to share those interesting things, and to openly face the "what and why?" of philosophy as a practice, as a student at once leery of and devoted to it.

In part, I use this blog to explore ideas that I may go on to develop in my work. It is not, however, a portfolio of polished papers - it is more of an open notebook. It is likely to bear little resemblance to what most academic philosophers actually do. That is not to say that I expect to be allowed free reign in making bold and bombastic proclamations - only that when I inevitably do, I hope the reader will extend the benefit of the doubt that in at least a modest minority of the cases, tacit premises or supporting arguments have been omitted for brevity or interest, not just from ignorance.

My first post goes into a bit more detail on my motivations for starting the blog and studying philosophy. I also post shorter thoughts regularly on Twitter. If you want, I can email you once-in-a-while notifications of blog updates. If you have any questions or comments feel free to email me at editor@thehenwell.com.