Notes from the Crawl Room: A Collection of Philosophical Horrors

Notes from the Crawl Room employs the lens and methods of horror writing to critique the excesses and absurdities of philosophy. Each story reveals disastrous and de-humanising effects of philosophies that are separated from real, lived experience (e.g. the absurdity of arguing over a sentence in Kant while the world burns around us). From a Kafkaesque exploration of administrative absurdities to the horrors of discursive violence, white supremacy and the living spectres of patriarchy, A.M. Moskovitz doesn't shy away from addressing the complex aspects of our lives. In addition to offering often humourous critiques of philosophy, these works are also, somewhat ironically, pieces of philosophy themselves. Each story seeks to move a subject area forward offering the reader the capacity to think through ideas in a weirder and more open way than traditional philosophy usually allows. An antidote to philosophy that seeks to close down and shut off the imaginative potential of human thought, Notes from the Crawl Room revels in the unsettling and creative potential of stories for revealing what thinking philosophically might really mean.

Table of Contents:
Introductory Essay: Uroborotic Horror by Susan K. Lang 1. The Ring of Gyges 2. Cousin Vincent 3. By which we learn that “Snow is white” 4. Empty Man I: The German Logician (1902) 5. The Gravesend Institute 6. A Response to C.D. Baird’s Reading of the Pitwell Phenomenon 7. Empty Man II: Theodore (1999) 8. Bare Substrata 9. such brittle bodies 10. Empty Man III: Marcia (2010) 11. The Locked Room 12. Campus Rumpus I–V 13. The Master’s Delight 14. Cloakroom, 1984 15. Empty Man IV: Abbie (2018) 16. Mycorrhizae 17. A Manifesto for Horror As Critique of Analytic Philosophy Appendix I: Recurring Characters Appendix II: Quotations Select Bibliography Acknowledgements Credits

About the Author :
Adam Ferner has worked in academic philosophy in France and the UK. He is author of Organisms and Personal Identity (2016), Think Differently: Open your mind. Philosophy for Modern Life: 20 Thought-Provoking Lessons (2018), How to Disagree: Negotiate difference in a divided world.: 20 thought-provoking lessons (with Darren Chetty, 2019), Philosophy: A Crash Course: Become An Instant Expert (with Zara Bain and Nadia Mehdi, 2019) and Philosophical Empires (with Chris Meyns, 2020). Adam is also Associate Editor of the Forum Essays, and founding member of the Changelings fiction collective. His horror series 'Campus Rumpus' was published in The Philosopher's Magazine. Katherine Angel is a writer and Lecturer in Creative Writing at Birkbeck, University of London. She is author of Unmastered: A Book on Desire, Most Difficult to Tell (2012) and Daddy Issues (2019)

Review :
Kafka wrote that ‘we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us’. Notes from the Crawl Room makes its mark more insidiously, uncovering the wounds that already exist in us and our institutions, those parts of ourselves we prefer to disavow. Disappearances, burnings, hauntings, and the violence inherent in reason: A.M. Moskowitz’s vanished selves exemplify the words of the playwright Sarah Kane, another master explorer of the psyche’s nightmarish corridors: ‘It is myself I have never met, whose face is pasted on the underside of my mind.’ These are tales of psychic horror that creep under the skin and burrow their way inexorably to the heart. These uncanny stories of philosophical horror surprise, delight and perplex. Notes from the Crawl Room is at once a warning of what happens when the philosophical impulse is taken too far, and a reminder of how seductive that impulse can be.