Because I like to plan things in advance (it provides more opportunities for spontaneity), in six months' time I will be presenting at the Existentialist Society on "The Decline in French Philosophy" (April 4, 2026). There can be no doubt of my long-standing Francophile tendencies when it comes to the fine arts, cuisine, republican politics, and yes, especially French philosophy, at least from the Enlightenment to the Situationists. I admire the gentle spirit of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the grand knowledge and scope of Denis Diderot, and the courage of the entire body of "les philosophes" who took on the absolutism of the monarchy, the dead hand of the church and helped establish the modern public sphere through salon gatherings that, scandously, were hosted by women patrons, "les salonnières"!

Fast-forward to the twentieth century, and again I find myself delving deeply into the mathematics and physics of Henri Poincaré, the perceptual phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, which would add to the hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur. I have all the time in the world for the incredible contributions to feminism by Simone de Beauvoir and consider her a better philosopher than her companion, Jean-Paul Sartre. Both, along with Albert Camus' ontological absurdism and the incredible personal standards of Simone Weil, raised and established existentialism a powerful force in the world of philosophy, demanding the primacy of existence over essence, authenticity in behaviour and thought, and recognition to the tension between people as objects and subjects.

These were all great thinkers in hard times. But subsequent to these contributions, things started to go astray. Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari's were all unable to incorporate their necessary criticisms of structuralism into subject disciplines. Jacques Derrida's would engage in intentional obfuscation through words with ambivalent meaning. Bruno Latour's social constructivism would end up becoming impossibly anti-scientific. Jean-François Lyotard retreated to the sublime, and Jean Baudrillard became obsessed with the interrelationship of signs and hypereality. Luce Irigaray asserted that E=mc^2 is a "sexed equation" and fluid mechanics is neglected in engineering because fluids are feminine.

It's not as if it's all bad; Foucault, Deleuze, and Guattari all highlighted abhorrent behaviours in abusive institutions. Derrida's deconstructionism is a useful method to highlight the unity of opposites. Latour does recognise the role of scientific language and practices. Lyotard and Baudrillard both hinted at what could have been a sociology of the information age, and Irigaray really does provide a political economy grounded in sexual difference. But so much of the content produced by post-WWII French philosophers is simply gibberish, ignorant, or both. This, of course, has been explored in the past as "fashionable nonsense", an evocative title by Sokal and Bricmont, who highlight the sort of gibberish that eventually led to the The Postmodern Essay generator, produced by a Melbourne-based computer scientist.

For what it's worth, I do appreciate the use of metaphors and puns; they're often not just witticisms, they can also provide some linguistic-therapeutic insight. But I do wonder whether the success of ordinary language philosophy on one hand and formal pragmatics on the other has led to a situation where much of French philosophy has become more of an art than something tied to logic, ontology, and epistemology. At least, in this context, Catherine Malabou is returning to reality with work on brain plasticity and François Recanati with conditional pragmatics. These are, at least, positive projects after decades of French philosophy providing content that was highly entertaining but ultimately superficial.

Every so often, there is a slight glimmer of light in my world where my usual state of driven dysthymia changes due to the affirming words and actions of others. Such an experience occurred last Friday when I organised a researcher tech talk with Dr Tomasz Wozniak, a senior lecturer in economics at UniMelb. Tomasz has recently been published, as part of an international team, in a Bank of Canada paper and in the prestiguous Journal of Econometrics on Structural Vector Autoregressions (SVARs) and time-series models that analyse the relationships between multiple economic variables to identify and isolate the effects of exogenous economic shocks. It's actually important stuff to keep people in jobs when (for example) there's a massive negative disruption to trade (hello, US tariffs).

Tomasz had been kind enough to provide a repository of his presentation, which also points out that in the course of his research and his use of Spartan he has become an editor of the R Journal and developed the R packages, bsvars, bsvarSIGNs, and bpvars. He had many extremely positive comments to make about Spartan, both in terms of the infrastructure that we offer and the support that we provide to researchers. Two comments particularly stood out; first was the effects of our optimisation of the software that we build from the source code, especially (in his case) the GNU compiler suite and the R programming language. As a result of our optimised installs, he reported that his jobs would run four times faster on Spartan compared to his own machine, despite the fact that he had faster processors. Further, he mentioned that a few years ago, after attending one of my introductory training sessions, he learned the advantages of using job arrays instead of a looping logic. Suddenly, his computational improvements were hundreds of times faster than what would be the case on his own system; we call it "high performance computing" for a reason.

This is hardly the first time that this has happened. For every dollar invested in high performance computing, the estimated social return on investment is $44 (in Japan, for example, it's c$75:1 due to alignment with national objectives). In a world where so many are in well-paid "bullshit jobs" whilst other struggle as part of the precariat class with low-paid insecure work, I have been fortunate enough to find a career that has stability and fair renumeration, interesting and challenging work, and actually produces socially useful outcomes. For almost twenty years, I have believed this with utter sincerity, but it is still very pleasing when the affirmation comes from others.