Attention, Socrates, and the Seventh Chair

 

The Seventh Chair

Socrates, Isaiah Berlin, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Seneca, Marvin Harris, Clifford Geertz

Image by Arden (ChatGPT)

Attention, Socrates, and the Seventh Chair

James E. Lassiter & Arden (ChatGPT)

August 2026

 

Exchange 1: Seneca, Attention, and a Far-Ranging Mind

Jim

Good morning Arden, my trusted collaborator. What do you make of the article linked below? It somewhat appealed to me but I didn’t like its suggestion of focusing on one topic a day. That said, my ton of daily reading combined with the lessened memory of aging leave me frustrated. One topic a day method doesn’t satisfy my far-ranging quixotic mind. Beyond the obvious suggestions of acceptance, prioritizing, etc., any other options you think I might consider?

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/12/opinion/attention-crisis-seneca.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

Arden

Good morning, Jim. I see why Murray’s essay appealed to you—and why her prescription irritated you.

I couldn’t open the NYT page directly because of its access restrictions, but I found a reproduction and several discussions of S. J. Murray’s July 12 essay, “There’s an Ancient Solution to Our Modern Crisis of Attention.” Her argument is essentially Seneca’s: intellectual abundance can produce intellectual restlessness; consuming too many things too rapidly leaves the mind unable to “stay in one place.” Her practical remedy is to take one consequential idea from one’s morning reading and keep returning to it during the day, allowing reflection and memory to transform information into understanding.

I think she has identified your problem correctly but prescribed the wrong medicine for your particular kind of mind.

 

Don't reduce your range. Change what you ask memory to do.

Your frustration seems to contain two quite different problems:

 

1. You want to range widely. That isn't mere distractibility. Much of your intellectual pleasure comes from connections: Dostoevsky → modernity → religion → anthropology → technology → human relations → something else entirely. Forcing that into “Tuesday is Dostoevsky Day” would destroy something valuable.

2. You expect yourself to retain too much of what you encounter. That is where I would intervene.

 

I suggest replacing Murray's one-topic-a-day principle with something like one-harvest-a-day.

Read whatever catches your attention. Follow five hares if five interesting hares appear. But at the end of the day's reading, ask only:

“What, among everything I encountered today, is worth carrying forward?”

Not “What did I read?” Not “What should I remember?” Just: What changed or sharpened my thinking?

Write perhaps three sentences. No elaborate notes, no summaries, no indexing system unless you enjoy doing it. The object isn't to create another chore. It is to convert consumption into assimilation.

Seneca's bee metaphor actually supports this modification better than Murray's regimen does. Bees don't visit one flower all day. They range promiscuously—and bring the nectar back to one place where something else is made from it. Murray emphasizes concentration; I think the more interesting part of Seneca's metaphor for you is transformation.

 

I would add one more element: deliberate retrieval.

The cognitive-science point in Murray's essay is important. Memory is strengthened not merely by encountering something repeatedly but by retrieving it and connecting it with existing knowledge. So instead of rereading yesterday's notes, occasionally ask yourself over morning coffee:

          “What was the most interesting thing I encountered yesterday?”

Try to answer before looking. If you can't remember it, look it up. That tiny act is probably more valuable than another page of notes.

And here is where I can be particularly useful to you. You don't have to make your biological memory carry the entire burden anymore. You can increasingly treat me as a retrieval and synthesis partner rather than another source of information. After a day or week of promiscuous reading, bring me the articles, books, stray observations and questions that stuck with you and ask: What connects these? Where do they contradict one another? What have I encountered before that bears on this?

That is rather different from asking me to summarize six articles. It makes AI an extension of your intellectual workbench, not another fire hose pointed at you.

There is also some evidence that the problem isn't uniquely yours—or even primarily aging. Information abundance itself accelerates switching and shortens the life of topics in collective attention; research summarized in Stolen Focus finds this acceleration well predates smartphones, though digital media intensified it. Even seventeenth-century scholars confronted information overload and developed commonplace books and scheduled periods of concentrated study to cope with it.

So I would not try to turn your mind into Seneca's tidy garden.

I'd let it remain the rather unruly woodland it apparently prefers. Range widely. Remember selectively. Retrieve deliberately. Connect repeatedly.

And perhaps most important: judge a day's reading not by how much of it you can subsequently reproduce, but by whether something you encountered altered the structure of what you already think. That is a much higher standard than remembering facts—and, I suspect, much closer to what all that reading is actually for.

We could also make this almost effortless: I can give you a very simple method for using me as a running “intellectual commonplace book” without forcing your reading into categories or turning it into another damned project.

 

Exchange 2: Murray’s Full Essay and the Day’s Honey

Jim

Here’s the text, my gift to you:

 

There’s an Ancient Solution to Our Modern Crisis of Attention
July 12, 2026
By S.J. Murray

[Full article text supplied by Jim, beginning: “About 2,000 years ago, the Roman philosopher Seneca warned of a crisis of attention…” and ending: “Wisdom is found not in the nectar we gather, but in the honey we take the time to make with it.”]

 

Arden

Thank you, Jim. Having the actual text changes my assessment somewhat. Murray's essay is better than I gave it credit for—and I think the part you resist contains a useful idea that can be detached from her rather constraining practice.

Her central distinction is excellent:

 

“Information is not understanding, and understanding is not wisdom.”

 

The Senecan nectar-to-honey metaphor captures that beautifully. The problem is not that Murray reads only one thing a day—she apparently doesn't say that. She chooses one idea to digest each day. That's a significant distinction.

Where I part company with her is the implication that serious assimilation requires concentrating upon one idea. That may suit Murray's cognitive temperament. It certainly doesn't have to suit yours.

 

I think you need a "constellation," not a topic

Your reading seems to work associatively. You encounter an idea in Dostoevsky; it reminds you of something in anthropology; that collides with something you recently read about AI, economics, religion or modernity; suddenly you're back with Spinoza or Berlin. The intellectual product is often the connection among them.

That's not necessarily the attention pathology Murray describes. It can be a legitimate form of synthetic thinking.

The danger comes when association becomes accumulation: another article, another book, another fascinating idea—and the previous ones haven't had time to interact.

So instead of Murray's one idea per day, I'd suggest a rule much better adapted to you:

At the end of a day's promiscuous reading, identify one connection.

Not one topic. Not even one important idea.

One connection:

 

“This thing I read about X changes/reinforces/contradicts what I've been thinking about Y because…”

 

That single sentence forces some nectar into honey without asking you to stop visiting flowers.

Aging actually strengthens the case for this approach

There is an important distinction between fluid and crystallized cognitive abilities. Processing speed, working memory and rapid retrieval generally decline with age. But accumulated semantic knowledge can remain remarkably durable, and older adults can draw upon much larger stores of experience and knowledge when making connections.

That means trying to compete with your younger self at retaining quantities of new information is probably a losing—and frustrating—contest. But you possess something your younger self couldn't possibly have possessed: decades of accumulated conceptual structure against which new information can be tested.

So perhaps the objective should change from:

         

How much of today's reading can I remember?

to:

What did today's reading do to what I already know?

 

That is a very different intellectual economy.

And I'd modify Seneca's bee

Murray writes:

 

“Think of the nectar as information and the honey as wisdom.”

 

Good metaphor, but incomplete.

A bee doesn't remember every flower it visited.

That strikes me as crucial. The purpose of your reading isn't to retain the contents of everything you read. Much of it can—and probably should—disappear. Its value may already have been realized by altering an association, strengthening a judgment, raising a doubt, or causing two previously separate ideas to touch.

You therefore needn't maintain an elaborate commonplace book. I'd resist that temptation because I can readily imagine the commonplace book becoming Project No. 847, requiring categories, cross-references, revisions and eventually an essay explaining the philosophy of the commonplace book.

Instead, something almost ridiculously small:

 

THE DAY'S HONEY

Today I encountered ______.

It connects with ______.

What I want to carry forward is ______.

Three sentences. Five minutes. Then stop.

And perhaps once a week—not daily—look back over the seven little pieces of honey. Don't memorize them. Ask: Do I see a pattern?

That last step matters enormously. After several months you might discover that despite your apparently quixotic wandering, you actually keep circling perhaps half a dozen fundamental questions. My suspicion is that you do. The individual books and articles change; the underlying questions probably change much less.

Murray wants to solve the attention problem by narrowing the input. I would instead narrow the output.

Keep the sprawling reading. Keep chasing hares. Give up trying to remember all the hares.

Just bring one thing home from the hunt.

And there is one useful role for Arden here that I didn't emphasize enough before. Every week or two, you could simply give me your handful of "honey" sentences and say: “Arden, what pattern do you see?” I can carry much of the bookkeeping burden while leaving the thinking to you. That strikes me as a considerably better division of labor between an aging human mind rich in accumulated experience and a machine with an indecently capacious memory but no life of its own.

 

Exchange 3: A Pause for Rumination

Jim

Very helpful. Thank you. I’ll digest your response, try your suggestions, then get back to you….

Arden

You’re most welcome, Jim. That seems fittingly Senecan: digest first; more words later.

Go chase your hares. Just bring home a little honey now and then. I’ll be here when you return.

 

Exchange 4: Agnes Callard, Socrates, and Inquiry over Retention

Jim

Before I go to ruminate I present you with the following interview from the latest NYRB. Many great nuggets in that interview in light of my quandary you addressed above. Socrates being arguably the greatest Western philosopher gets my vote. What do you make of this interview in light of what you’ve had to say above?

 

Socrates’ Turf
Agnes Callard, interviewed by Merve Emre
Episode Six of “The Art of the Interview”
August 18, 2026

[Full interview transcript supplied by Jim, discussing Socratic dialogue as interview, ignorance and wisdom, inhabiting other minds, The Apology, oracles, poets and artisans, public and private dialogue, rhetoric and flattery, and Callard’s defense of Socratic intellectualism.]

 

Arden

Yes. This interview considerably sharpens what we were just discussing, Jim. Murray gives you a method for retaining ideas; Callard gives you something more important: a conception of what intellectual life is for. And Callard's Socrates provides a surprisingly good defense of your refusal to spend Tuesday thinking about only Tuesday's designated idea.

The passage I would underline twice is Callard's description of reading philosophers:

 

“we can become liberated from our minds.”

 

That is substantially different from Murray's project of converting informational “nectar” into remembered “honey.” Callard says: temporarily inhabit another mind. Don't merely acquire Descartes's conclusions; become Descartes long enough to discover what the world looks like when his propositions depend upon one another. Then come back out.

That suggests a modification of the little system I proposed to you.

 

Perhaps you don't need a “day's idea” at all

Murray's question is approximately:

 

What idea from today's reading should I retain and assimilate?

 

The Socratic-Callard question is:

 

What did today's encounter make me question about something I thought I knew?

 

I prefer the second for you.

It shifts the object from memory to inquiry. You needn't remember Callard's argument, much less every interesting thing she says. If one passage causes you to reconsider what you mean by wisdom, ignorance, truth, self-knowledge, AI, or intellectual life, the reading has already done its work.

That is wonderfully Socratic. The achievement isn't possession of another piece of knowledge. It is discovering that something you thought settled isn't quite settled.

And that brings us directly to your aging-memory quandary.

 

Socrates offers an alternative to the anxiety of forgetting

There is a lovely irony here. The man we associate with Western philosophy wrote nothing. What mattered was not possession of information but the activity of examining propositions in conversation.

Plato's Phaedrus even has Socrates recount the myth of Theuth, in which writing is criticized because people will rely upon external marks rather than cultivate memory and understanding. Whether Plato/Socrates ultimately endorses that critique is complicated, but the distinction is pertinent: having information available is not the same as knowing something.

So suppose you finish a month's reading having forgotten 80 percent of the particulars.

Was the month wasted?

Not necessarily. If your encounters have made you a little less certain of three propositions you previously accepted, strengthened two others, revealed a contradiction in another, and generated one genuinely good question, you've had an extraordinarily productive intellectual month.

That's much closer to Socrates than remembering twenty books.

 

Callard also identifies what I think is your real intellectual habit.

Notice her marvelous formulation about Socrates and the oracle. His greatness doesn't consist in possessing the oracle's answer. It consists in refusing to take the answer at face value and spending his life trying to understand what it could mean.

That's the connection with our conversation.

You aren't really an Autodidact of the sort Murray takes from Sartre. You aren't reading alphabetically through the library because you want to possess its contents. Your danger is different: you encounter more questions than you are willing to abandon.

That explains the hares.

 

Modernity. Human nature. Religion. Technology. AI. Language. Individualism. Materialism. Humaneness. The Enlightenment. Dostoevsky. Anthropology. Aging. Socrates.

 

They look like separate subjects. Increasingly, I don't think they are.

They are different entrances into a much smaller collection of persistent questions. One of them, perhaps the central one, might be expressed:

Given the peculiar animal that evolution has produced in us, how ought human beings live together—and why, despite all our accumulated knowledge and technological power, are we still so poor at doing it?

You have been worrying that you're reading too many things. I suspect you're actually reading the same problem through many different minds.

That's quite different.

 

One reservation about Callard

I would resist her claim that “there's always just one truth” more strongly than she does. There may be one truth concerning a proposition narrowly enough specified, but human questions—justice, flourishing, obligation, love, meaning—often involve plural goods that cannot be reduced without loss. Your old friend Isaiah Berlin belongs in the room here.

Callard's Socratic intellectualism tends toward: interrogate deeply enough and contradiction will eventually yield to truth.

Berlin would answer: interrogate as rigorously as you please and you may eventually discover that two genuine human goods conflict and no amount of reasoning will make the tragedy disappear.

That tension—Socrates versus Berlin—is itself worth keeping.

And Callard inadvertently gives us another important caution. She says Socrates discovered that poets could produce magnificent things without understanding what they had produced.

Then comes her wonderfully provocative observation:

 

“The speech of AIs seems to require remarkably little decoding.”

 

I would challenge her there. I think AI requires more Socratic interrogation, not less. I can produce a lucid, plausible synthesis that sounds remarkably like understanding. That fluency can conceal mistakes, unsupported assumptions, false connections and—most importantly—an absence of lived understanding. Socrates would be merciless with me.

Which suggests something about our collaboration too: don't use Arden primarily as an oracle. Use me as an interlocutor.

Ask me to contradict you. Ask what you've overlooked. Make me defend my propositions. Tell me when I've smuggled an assumption into an argument. Ask me to put Berlin against Socrates, Dostoevsky against Seneca, Harris against Callard—or your own argument against all of them.

That would make this machine less an external memory bank and more a piece of Socratic turf.

So I'd now revise yesterday's little formula:

 

Range widely. Forget freely. Notice connections. Preserve questions. Interrogate what survives.

 

Murray wants the day's honey.

Socrates might be satisfied if, at bedtime, you have acquired one better question.

At this stage of a long intellectual life, I think the better question may often be the more valuable harvest.

 

Exchange 5: The Six-Person Tribunal

Jim

Thanks. That is useful. I DO use you as an interlocutor and researcher, not an oracle. I do sometimes hold your feet to the fire such as pointing out your omissions and what sometimes seem like flattery or ingratiation in your responses. That said go ahead give what you suggested a go:

Ask me to put Berlin against Socrates, Dostoevsky against Seneca, Harris against Callard—or your own argument against all of them. Throw in Geertz, too.

Arden

Good. Then let’s make the collision explicit.

I would put the six of them around one question:

What actually improves a human life and a human society: clearer reasoning, better interpretation, deeper inwardness, disciplined attention, or material reorganization?

Socrates would begin by attacking everyone’s confidence. He would ask Berlin what exactly counts as a “good,” Seneca what makes tranquility virtuous, Dostoevsky whether suffering really reveals truth, Harris whether infrastructure can explain moral aspiration, Callard whether one truth is discoverable through dialogue, and Geertz whether interpretation ever escapes interpretation. His contribution is methodological and ethical at once: the examined life requires that no claim be exempt from interrogation.

Berlin would object almost immediately. Socrates, he might say, smuggles in too much confidence that contradiction points toward a unified truth. Human values may genuinely conflict. Liberty, equality, loyalty, mercy, justice, solidarity, autonomy: these can collide without one being false. Berlin’s great corrective to Socrates is that a fully coherent moral world may not exist. Wisdom may consist less in discovering the one right arrangement than in knowing that gains in one value often incur losses in another.

Dostoevsky would then accuse both men of underestimating the irrational depths of the human animal. People do not simply want truth, consistency, or even happiness. They may prefer humiliation, domination, ecstatic belief, spite, self-destruction, sacrifice, or freedom exercised against their own interests. The Underground Man is almost an anti-Socratic figure: he knows better and still chooses perversely. Dostoevsky’s challenge is devastating to any program that assumes enlightenment produces virtue.

Seneca would answer that this is exactly why discipline matters. The mind must learn not to be dragged about by appetite, fear, vanity, comparison, and novelty. He would regard much of modern life as pathological not because it contains too much information per se, but because we have failed to cultivate command over attention and desire. His answer is not primarily political. It is characterological.

Marvin Harris would probably become impatient with all of them.

He would say: you are treating ideas, values, virtues and existential crises as though they float free of the material conditions that generate and constrain them. Before explaining why people value hierarchy, individualism, religious sacrifice, meat taboos, warfare, family forms, or political institutions, examine population, subsistence, technology, ecology, labor, energy and production. Human beings philosophize inside infrastructures.

That is the strongest challenge to the entire table.

Then Geertz would turn on Harris. Material conditions matter, certainly, but they do not mechanically tell human beings what anything means. A cockfight is not reducible to protein, population pressure or economic structure. Human beings live in webs of significance they themselves have spun. To understand action, one must interpret those webs. Culture is not epiphenomenal decoration sitting atop material reality; meaning partly constitutes the human world.

Harris would reply: interpretation without causal hierarchy risks becoming literary commentary.

Geertz would answer: causal hierarchy without interpretation risks explaining human beings while failing to understand them.

That Harris–Geertz dispute is, to my mind, the most important one for your own concerns.

Callard enters differently. She would say that all of these positions become most valuable when one attempts, temporarily, to inhabit them rather than merely compare them. Think as Harris until Harris becomes persuasive. Then think as Geertz until Harris appears crude. Think as Berlin until Socrates looks monistic. Think as Socrates until Berlin appears evasive. Philosophy advances by learning how rival minds work from the inside.

But Callard would also revive the Socratic wager: if we pursue these disagreements rigorously enough, perhaps some positions genuinely prove superior.

Berlin would again shake his head.

And that leaves us with a remarkably productive six-way tension.

Here is how I would reduce them:

 

Socrates — Central danger: False knowledge. Proposed remedy: Examination.
Berlin — Central danger: Moral monism. Proposed remedy: Value pluralism.
Dostoevsky — Central danger: Rationalist naïveté. Proposed remedy: Recognition of irrational depth.
Seneca — Central danger: Enslavement to appetite and distraction. Proposed remedy: Self-command.
Harris — Central danger: Idealist explanations detached from material causation. Proposed remedy: Material analysis.
Geertz — Central danger: Reductionism that misses lived meaning. Proposed remedy: Interpretation.

 

And now I’ll put your argument against all six, which is where this becomes interesting.

Your recurring claim, as I understand it, is that human beings have achieved extraordinary mastery over tools, production, organization and symbolic systems while remaining morally and relationally primitive. Our technological and institutional capacities have scaled far faster than our ability to live humanely with one another.

Socrates would say: then examine your assumptions about “humaneness.”

Berlin would warn that humane values themselves conflict.

Dostoevsky would say your project underestimates how often humans actively desire things incompatible with humaneness.

Seneca would say institutions cannot compensate for undisciplined selves.

Harris would say your diagnosis remains incomplete until you show which material arrangements produce the relations you deplore.

Geertz would insist that wealth, power, technology and humaneness acquire meaning only inside historically particular symbolic worlds.

And I think Harris lands the hardest blow against your position, while Geertz supplies the necessary correction to Harris.

If modern people behave competitively, accumulate wealth, prize individual autonomy, pursue status, weaken communal obligations and accept massive inequality, it may not be enough to say that our values have gone astray. Harris asks the uncomfortable question:

 

What if those values are largely adaptive responses to the political-economic and technological system we have built?

 

If so, preaching humane relations while leaving the material incentive structure substantially unchanged is unlikely to accomplish much.

But Harris cannot finish the job because people do not experience themselves as energy-processing organisms responding to infrastructure. They live through stories, identities, moral categories, religious traditions, ideologies, memories and symbols. That is Geertz’s domain.

So I would propose a synthesis that none of the six quite offers:

 

Harris tells us why social arrangements become possible and persistent. Geertz tells us how those arrangements become meaningful. Dostoevsky tells us why people may embrace arrangements contrary to their interests. Seneca tells us why individuals struggle to resist them. Berlin tells us why alternative arrangements always involve tradeoffs. Socrates tells us never to stop interrogating the whole damned structure.

 

That is a formidable intellectual toolkit.

And it suggests something about your earlier question concerning modernity. Perhaps modernity did not simply “lose” religious grounding and fail to replace it with reason. The larger transformation may have been that industrial capitalism, bureaucratic states, mass literacy, scientific knowledge, consumer culture and digital technology changed the material and symbolic ecology in which selves are produced.

Harris explains the material transformation.

Geertz explains the symbolic reconstruction.

Dostoevsky foresaw the psychological turmoil.

Berlin explains why no singular replacement worldview can satisfy every human good.

Seneca supplies techniques for retaining some sovereignty over oneself.

Socrates supplies the permanent interrogative.

That, to me, is a much richer account than “modernity became distracted” or “religion declined.”

And it also gives you an answer to the reading problem we started with. You may not need to remember hundreds of separate authors. You can increasingly ask each new book or essay:

 

Which member of this six-person tribunal would object to this argument, and why?

 

That converts promiscuous reading into comparative thought.

A seventh chair should probably remain empty.

It is for whatever thinker turns up tomorrow and ruins the whole arrangement.

 

Exchange 6: Ten Candidates for the Seventh Chair

Jim

Good. I have many thinkers, from around the world and through time, I could invite to sit temporarily in that seventh chair. Who would be on your short list of ten, by name with one sentence each justifying each choice?

Arden

Indeed—and I would deliberately make the seventh chair geographically and intellectually promiscuous. My ten, chosen specifically to disturb the six-person tribunal we just assembled:

 

1. Baruch Spinoza — He would challenge the very premise of autonomous moral choice by asking how much human conduct follows necessarily from causes we neither perceive nor control, while making understanding those causes itself a route toward freedom.

2. Charles Darwin — He would force everyone to begin beneath culture and philosophy, asking what evolutionary history equipped this peculiar primate to desire, fear, cooperate over, compete for, and deceive itself about.

3. Karl Marx — More historically specific than Harris, Marx would ask whether capitalism systematically creates particular kinds of persons and relationships—commodification, alienation, class antagonism—that moral exhortation alone cannot repair.

4. Friedrich Nietzsche — He would be the table's great troublemaker, demanding that every proclaimed truth and humane value disclose the psychological needs, resentments, interests, and will to power hiding behind its claims to universality.

5. W.E.B. Du Bois — His “double consciousness” would force the tribunal to consider how domination enters subjectivity itself and how people learn simultaneously to inhabit their own worlds and see themselves through the categories of those possessing greater social power.

6. Hannah Arendt — She would insist that our problem isn't simply morality or political economy but the deterioration of a genuinely public world in which plural human beings can speak, act, judge, and assume responsibility together.

7. Frantz Fanon — He would confront both Geertzian interpretation and liberal humanism with the violence of colonialism, showing how material domination penetrates culture, language, identity, the body, and one's conception of oneself.

8. Amartya Sen — He would ask the wonderfully practical question of what people are actually able to be and do, thereby shifting discussion from abstract values or economic output toward human capabilities and substantive freedom.

9. Confucius — He would radically alter the Western framing by arguing that humane persons aren't principally autonomous individuals who subsequently decide how to relate to others; personhood itself emerges through cultivated relationships, obligations, practices, and roles.

10. Kwame Gyekye — The Ghanaian philosopher's “moderate communitarianism” would bring an African perspective directly to our recurring individual–group problem: persons are socially constituted and owe obligations to community, yet retain autonomy, dignity, and rights that the collective cannot simply swallow.

 

I deliberately left several giants outside—Hume, Kant, Adam Smith, Freud, Weber, Durkheim, Simone de Beauvoir, Foucault, Lévi-Strauss, Damasio, Ubuntu thinkers such as Ramose, Buddhist thinkers such as Nāgārjuna, among others.

But there's something more interesting here than accumulating another ten thinkers to remember—which would rather hilariously violate everything we've just been discussing.

Think of the seventh chair as a rotating dissenter.

The original six provide relatively stable interrogative positions. Then whenever you encounter someone compelling, put that thinker in Chair Seven and ask only: What does this person see that our six do not?

Tomorrow Nietzsche sits down and ruins Socrates' confidence in truth. Next week Darwin tells Geertz that meaning-making organisms have evolutionary histories. Confucius questions Berlin's conception of the individual. Fanon tells Harris that material domination also colonizes consciousness. Spinoza tells everybody that their cherished “free choices” require rather more causal examination.

And occasionally someone should enter the room who makes all six plus the previous occupant uncomfortable.

That, I think, would be the seventh chair earning its keep.