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Practice in Still Life: Fragments, Essays, and Lectures

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Recent posts

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Practice in Still Life 9: The Shape of Thought to Come
An essay on immanence, transcendence, practice, and the problem of nihilism
 • Adam Robbert
What I Read This Year
A list of books and essays in the world of scholarship that changed my thinking and writing in 2025
 • Adam Robbert
From Teleology to Procedure
On John Rawls’s claim that pluralism requires procedural justice absent metaphysical claims, and my rejoinder that procedure may be a civic form of a…
 • Adam Robbert
Found to Constructed Orders
On How, in Charles Taylor’s Reading, the Practices of Participation in Plato and Augustine Are Transformed in Descartes into the Construction and…
 • Adam Robbert
2:02:14
Disputations 3: Contemporary Natural Philosophy Needs a New Theory of Forms
This is the third in our new disputations series on Substack Live, featuring Matthew David Segall, Jacob Given, and yours truly
 • Adam Robbert, Matthew David Segall, and Jacob Given
On the Good as "Beyond Being"
A brief exegesis on a much commented upon passage in Plato's Republic
 • Adam Robbert
Toronto Talk
Full transcript and video below of my talk for the Toronto Society, September 24, 2026.
 • Adam Robbert
Practice in Still Life 8: The Desert Philosopher
An introduction to Evagrius Ponticus (c. 345–399 AD), and his teachings on afflictive and virtuous thinking, put into the service of contemplation…
 • Adam Robbert

Essays

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On the Good as "Beyond Being"
A brief exegesis on a much commented upon passage in Plato's Republic
 • Adam Robbert
The Practice of Bergson’s Intuition
Henri Bergson makes clear that philosophy is upheld by transformations in perception, but we could do more to make those practices explicit. The…
 • Adam Robbert
Thinking is Creating
A description of thinking, via negativa, using Henri Bergson’s account of memory and perception—a thinking enabled by ekstasis, theōria, and poēsis.
 • Adam Robbert
The Practice of Synthesis
A look at Kant's transcendental philosophy as a contemplative discipline, showing how a priori structures and faculties can enable the cultivation of…
 • Adam Robbert
The Grammar of Being
An afterthought to last week's essay: On the ways in which being can be said to be, with recourse to Heidegger and Eckhart.
 • Adam Robbert
Theōria and the Disappearance of Form
What happens to the contemplative intellect when the reality of its objects is denied? A reflection on perception, practice, and the intelligibility of…
 • Adam Robbert
Attention is First Philosophy
The positive case, with illustrations from Aristotle, Descartes, and Merleau-Ponty, as well as five objections answered.
 • Adam Robbert
Practice, Perception, and Being: A Sequential Account
I want to take a moment and lay out—step by step—the view that anchors the project I set out to describe in Practice in Still Life.
 • Adam Robbert
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