five top things i’ve been reading (sixty-ninth edition)

• The Declaration of Independence

• Ghost Stories, Siri Hustvedt

• All original (real) materialists are full-on realists about consciousness, Galen Strawson

• The ‘Before’ trilogy, Richard Linklater

• L’Étranger, François Ozon

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This is the sixty-ninth in a weekly series. As with previous editions, I’ll move beyond things I’ve been reading, toward the end.

1) Last week, I read a load of things about The Declaration of Independence, in preparation for an event and a podcast. Most of all, however, I enjoyed reading the text itself. My first deep philosophical interest was social contract theory, and I find it hard not to see The Declaration squarely within that light.

The SCT guys (or the good ones, anyway) tell us that political authority rests on the consent of the governed. The DoI includes reference to “just powers” being derived “from the consent of the governed”. You can read my extended thoughts on this crossover, here. And watch out for a The Pursuit of Liberalism podcast episode — starring my excellent friends Zena Hitz and Hollis Robbins — soon!

2) Over the past week, I’ve been slowly reading Siri Hustvedt’s new book, Ghost Stories. Regular readers might remember how much I liked her novel What I Loved (2003). Somehow, Ghost Stories has so many of the same qualities, even though it is a memoir. Today’s post will be short on words because all I want to do is go finish reading it. Though I also don’t! It’s the best book I’ve read in ages.

3) I found this recent Galen Strawson post on mortalism very frustrating. I found it frustrating because it takes the form of Strawson addressing some excellent philosophical problems — questions about mental persistence following bodily death — via the text of a conversation he’d had with Claude.

Regular readers will know that I love talking with and thinking about AI. But I subscribe to Strawson’s substack because I want to know what Strawson thinks about philosophical problems! I’ve written here about his views several times over the past year. Ok, sure, the couple of small contributions Strawson made to the Claude conversation did some work in directing it, to some small extent. But I found that I just couldn’t be bothered to finish reading the post, even though the topic remained high in my mind for some hours.

I really can’t see the publication of AI chats — or, at least, AI chats like this one — taking off as a standard form of philosophical inquiry. As I’ve argued before, philosophers are particularly well insulated against AI ‘taking our jobs’, because there are many special reasons why humans are keen to read other humans doing philosophy.

4) I recently watched the ‘Before’ trilogy. These three movies, Before Sunrise (1995), Before Sunset (2004), and Before Midnight (2013), follow American guy Jesse and French girl Celine, occasionally, across several decades. First, they spend a day and night together, after meeting on a train on the way to Vienna. Then, they meet in Paris nine years later, and go on a little boat trip. Finally, we see them on holiday in Greece, another nine years after that.

It’s rare to see the substantive conversations of a couple presented on film, which surprises me. I found this phenomenon particularly lacking in recent ‘romantic movies’ that I otherwise quite enjoyed — not least, Oh Hi! (2025), Materialists (2025), and The Drama (2026).

5) While we’re on movies, I really loved François Ozon’s L’Étranger (2025), which I saw at the cinema a few weeks ago. I think it’s a pretty great novel, though I’m not into Camus’s philosophy. Ozon, however, never fails to impress me.

My favourite Ozon movie is probably Swimming Pool (2003), which — even though I haven’t seen it in maybe 15 years — must be one of the movies I’ve seen the most times. His L’Étranger is totally captivating and visually fantastic. (I had to check back to see if I was correct that it was in black and white!) He should turn to Houellebecq next.