NOTE TO SELVES

The Sonoran Desert, which covers much of the southwestern United States, is a vast expanse of arid earth where cartoonish entities-roadrunners, tumbleweeds, telephone-pole-tall succulents make occasional appearances.

- ALICE GREGORY

It was in this iconic, Looney Tunes landscape that dozens of philosophers gathered in the winter of 2022 at a threethousand-acre dude ranch on the outskirts of Tucson, Arizona, as if inhabiting a thought experiment of their own design. Between archery practice and lassoing lessons, they met in an adobe structure, where there was talk of "inconsistency relations" and "the concept of entailment." "How does 'probably' work?" was unanimously agreed to be one of the more polarizing questions a person could ask.

They were there to attend the Ranch Metaphysics Workshop, an annual conference conceived of nearly twenty years ago by Laurie Paul, a professor of philosophy at Yale University. Paul is the author of "Transformative Experience," a widely read philosophical investigation of personal change which has been translated into French, Japanese, and Arabic, with German and Mandarin translations in the works. Paul, whose work won the 2020 Lebowitz Prize for philosophical achievement, had selected the ranch for its small dining hall, which she hoped might foster intimate conversation. She wanted the event to combine the rigorous discussion of more typical academic conferences with, as she put it to me, "being kind of nice." It was an attempt, if only for a few days a year, to socially engineer some of the bullying out of a field infamous for an intellectual aggression so intense that reducing an interlocutor to tears was long considered at mark of successful debate.