Three Announcements

Personal and professional

1. I have received my author’s copies of All Things Are Full of Gods from Yale UP, and I have to say that, if nothing else, it is one of the most beautifully designed of my books. I was also sent some promotional images, one of which I share here just because it’s so pretty.

   

2. Robert Lawrence Kuhn (you may know him from his television program Closer to Truth) has published an article in the journal Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology entitled “A Landscape of Consciousness: Toward a Taxonomy of Explanations and Implications,” which even contains a section dedicated to your humble correspondent here. It is a wide-ranging synoptic view of the current status quaestionis in the philosophy of mind.

   

   (I couldn’t resist including another one.)

3. As you all already know, I have been enduring a health problem of some severity for the past two months. I have also been struggling with the inadequacies of the care (so called) available to me from my “in-network” providers and my parsimonious insurance company. I am now scheduled for cervical surgery some two and a half hours to my south, by a very fine surgeon. For a while, it was feared by all that I would have to pay out-of-pocket for whatever medical care I received, with estimates ranging from high five-figures to low six-figures. As a result, my eldest brother Addison, with the kindly connivance of the serene and beautiful Rainn Wilson, inaugurated a GoFundMe campaign to aid me in the event. Happily, my surgeon’s practice and the orthopedic hospital where the operation is to be performed are able to take my insurance. Assuming that my insurer creates no difficulties, I should end up being responsible only for my deductible (which is admittedly substantial, but not intolerable) and expenses. In the brief interval when the campaign was up and running, and before it had even been posted here and on other sites (the plan had been for Rainn to pen a heart-wrenching appeal to accompany it), donations had begun pouring in, many no doubt from some of you. You have my profoundest gratitude. The sum procured looks eerily commensurate with the expenses I can at present project—again, assuming the insurance company erects no obstacles. So I must ask from those of you who contributed: If there should be a residual sum after all is done, should I direct it toward some charitable foundations? And would you be so kind as to propose a few in the comments box of whatever announcement I might post here when the surgery is done? And would all of you start by proposing Doctors Without Borders and the World Wildlife Fund? (Not to put my thumb on the scales or anything….)