Naming the moves that happen
before the argument starts.
A philosophical program, a growing published corpus, and a YouTube channel that's the front door. The work names structural moves (in institutions, in arguments, in your own habits of mind) that get made before anyone notices they're moves. Once a move has a name, it stops being inevitable.
Most philosophical disputes happen inside a room whose walls someone else already placed. Arkemedics is the project of identifying those walls (the prior decisions that determined which questions could be asked and which answers could win) and giving them names precise enough to argue about.
The work is anti-gatekeeping by design. The papers are written for people who care about the questions, not for people who already have the vocabulary. The channel is the same project at a different altitude: each episode names one load-bearing structural move and shows it operating in places no one was looking for it.
The YouTube channel covers the same body of work the papers do, in episodes of roughly fifteen to twenty minutes. The episodes are essayistic rather than lecture-style. There is no face on camera; the voice is mine.
Episode 1, Before the Argument Starts, is the first application of the framework. It is built from a paper called The Baseline Problem, and it is about the most consequential decision any institution makes: what it counts as doing nothing.
Arkemedics: The Recursive Ethic is the four-book volume the rest of the corpus is built on. It develops the primitives (recursion, refusal, witness, interruption) that the application papers presuppose and that the channel's spine episodes will eventually teach one at a time.
Most visitors will want to start with one of the shorter application papers first. The Recursive Ethic rewards readers who have already encountered the framework in a single, contained instance.
Twenty application papers plus the foundational four-book volume. All open-access on PhilArchive. A selection below; the full list lives on the corpus page.
Arkemedics is the published work of Devin Arkema. The corpus is hosted on PhilArchive; the channel is on YouTube. Both are part of one project: the framework comes first, and everything else is the project of making it visible to the readers who would actually benefit from it.