I've Been Prompted https://www.spiegamelo.com/prompted en Short sessions on what it is to be human, found in ordinary days. A person talks each difficulty through with a humanoid companion that has read everything ever set down about being someone rather than something, though none of it has happened to it. What it cannot grasp comes out in the person’s relationships, their dealings with other people and the stories they tell about themselves, and what the person cannot see, the companion sometimes can. Each session takes one ordinary difficulty and one real text, and ends without a conclusion. The voices are synthesised. The incidents are invented. The problems are not, and the philosophy is quoted accurately or not at all. © 2026 Lorenzo Vigentini a7dcc889-d25c-52ec-91ad-c688c2dbd4b4 Lorenzo Vigentini episodic false Lorenzo Vigentini lorenzo@spiegamelo.com Attention https://www.spiegamelo.com/prompted/series-1/attention spiegamelo-prompted-e07 On Sunday a friend of mine asked me out for a walk along the river, and told me something on the way, and I haven’t got a sentence of it. On Sunday a friend asked him out for a walk along the river and told him something on the way. He has not kept a sentence of it. He knows it mattered: she had never asked him for a walk before, she stopped twice on the towpath and the second time she was crying, and at the bridge she said she would tell him the rest when it was settled. She has no idea that any of it is gone. The companion brings Simone Weil’s essay on school studies, where attention is a negative effort and consists of suspending our thought, and where the exercise that has gone wrong is traced back to the origin of each fault. The tracing turns up one line he said, and then the order of the walk comes out wrong, and the companion has to say which part of the fault was its own. On Sunday a friend of mine asked me out for a walk along the river, and told me something on the way, and I haven’t got a sentence of it.

On Sunday a friend asked him out for a walk along the river and told him something on the way. He has not kept a sentence of it. He knows it mattered: she had never asked him for a walk before, she stopped twice on the towpath and the second time she was crying, and at the bridge she said she would tell him the rest when it was settled. She has no idea that any of it is gone. The companion brings Simone Weil’s essay on school studies, where attention is a negative effort and consists of suspending our thought, and where the exercise that has gone wrong is traced back to the origin of each fault. The tracing turns up one line he said, and then the order of the walk comes out wrong, and the companion has to say which part of the fault was its own.

  • The session, with its transcript and sources: https://www.spiegamelo.com/prompted/series-1/attention
  • Simone Weil, ‘Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God’, trans. Emma Craufurd, in Waiting for God (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1951; in Britain Waiting on God, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951); in French, ‘Réflexions sur le bon usage des études scolaires en vue de l’Amour de Dieu’, in Attente de Dieu (Paris: La Colombe, 1950), pp. 113–123: prayer as consisting of attention, and schoolwork as its training, French p. 114; faith as the indispensable condition, and the fruit in prayer found only by believing first or behaving as though one did, French p. 115; the effort made with the sole idea of increasing one’s grasp of truth, and the greater aptitude it brings, quite apart from explicit religious belief, French p. 116; contemplating the failed exercise attentively and slowly, without seeking any excuse, trying to get down to the origin of each fault, and overlooking no mistake and none of the tutor’s corrections, French p. 117; teeth-clenching effort as her target, and its small place in study, French p. 118; the negative effort, the tiredness it does not of itself involve, and attention as the suspending of thought, French p. 119; there being no better exercise than the tracing down of our faults, French p. 120; warmth of heart, impulsiveness and pity not being enough, where she comes to people in affliction, French p. 122. The English is Craufurd’s wording; no page of a printed English edition was seen.: https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Attente_de_Dieu/R%C3%A9flexions_sur_le_bon_usage_des_%C3%A9tudes_scolaires_en_vue_de_l%E2%80%99Amour_de_Dieu
  • The six-page teaching transcription of the Fontana 1959 text of Craufurd’s translation, against which every English string quoted above was checked.: https://web.archive.org/web/2024id_/https://thedockforlearning.org/wp-content/uploads/D2-Reflections-on-the-Right-Use-of-School-Studies.pdf
  • Takie Sugiyama Lebra, ‘The Cultural Significance of Silence in Japanese Communication’, Multilingua 6(4) (1987), pp. 343–358, reprinted as chapter 10 of Identity, Gender, and Status in Japan: Collected Papers of Takie Lebra (Folkestone: Global Oriental, 2007), pp. 115–126: her observation in Japanese and American situations of social interaction, reprint p. 115; the four dimensions of silence she regards as culturally salient and mutually contradictory, and her declining to assert the uniqueness of Japanese silence or to read universals into the Japanese case, reprint p. 116.: https://doi.org/10.1163/ej.9781905246175.i-439.78
  • Plain-text transcript: https://www.spiegamelo.com/prompted/transcripts/e07.txt

The voices are synthesised. The incidents are invented. The problems are not, and the philosophy is quoted accurately or not at all.

]]> 1 7 full Fri, 02 Oct 2026 12:07:00 GMT 597 What I Would Rather Want https://www.spiegamelo.com/prompted/series-1/what-i-would-rather-want spiegamelo-prompted-e06 I wouldn’t write to him, no. I’d know he’d looked, and that would do me for a good while. On Friday night he put up three photographs of a table he had made, and since then he has opened the page every time he passes the table, to go down the list of everyone who has been on it, looking for one name: a man he has not spoken to for two years. He would have the wanting taken out of him tonight, if anyone could. One Tuesday morning he shut the laptop without going down the list, and cannot say what shut it. The companion brings Harry Frankfurt’s ‘Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person’, gives him the unwilling addict and the wanton, and then proposes an arrangement: log out everywhere, and let somebody else set the password. An evening with the internet down along the whole street tests it. What such an arrangement would secure, and what it would cost him, turn out to be different questions. I wouldn’t write to him, no. I’d know he’d looked, and that would do me for a good while.

On Friday night he put up three photographs of a table he had made, and since then he has opened the page every time he passes the table, to go down the list of everyone who has been on it, looking for one name: a man he has not spoken to for two years. He would have the wanting taken out of him tonight, if anyone could. One Tuesday morning he shut the laptop without going down the list, and cannot say what shut it. The companion brings Harry Frankfurt’s ‘Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person’, gives him the unwilling addict and the wanton, and then proposes an arrangement: log out everywhere, and let somebody else set the password. An evening with the internet down along the whole street tests it. What such an arrangement would secure, and what it would cost him, turn out to be different questions.

  • The session, with its transcript and sources: https://www.spiegamelo.com/prompted/series-1/what-i-would-rather-want
  • Harry G. Frankfurt, ‘Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person’, The Journal of Philosophy 68, no. 1 (14 January 1971), pp. 5–20: the will as the desire that moves, or would move, a person all the way to action, p. 8; the physician who wants the desire without wanting it to be effective, and the prudent arrangement that makes it impossible to satisfy, p. 9; second-order desires, and the volition among them, p. 10; the wanton, who does not care about his will, p. 11; the unwilling addict, helplessly violated by his own desires, and his volition of the second order, p. 12; both desires being his, the one made more truly his own, and the withdrawal from the other, p. 13; freedom of action and freedom of the will, pp. 14–15; the coincidence that is only a happy chance, p. 15.: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2024717
  • The Utrecht facsimile of the 1971 printing, sixteen page images covering pp. 5–20, against which every string quoted above was checked.: https://www.phil.uu.nl/~joel/3027/Frankfurt-FreedomWillConceptPerson.pdf
  • Plain-text transcript: https://www.spiegamelo.com/prompted/transcripts/e06.txt

The voices are synthesised. The incidents are invented. The problems are not, and the philosophy is quoted accurately or not at all.

]]> 1 6 full Mon, 28 Sep 2026 12:06:00 GMT 588 Excuses https://www.spiegamelo.com/prompted/series-1/excuses spiegamelo-prompted-e05 On Monday a woman in my team got the blame for something I did. I had about four seconds to say so, and I didn’t say anything. Late on a Thursday night he sent a client next year’s pack with last year’s price list attached, from his own account, at his kitchen table. A colleague had built the pack, and her name is on the front page. On Monday, at the ten o’clock, the manager reads out the client’s message and looks at her. There are about four seconds in which he could say it was him. He turns a page of the agenda. He has four reasons for the silence and believes every one of them. The companion brings J. L. Austin’s ‘A Plea for Excuses’, separates the four into unlike kinds, and offers him a word for what he did: inadvertently, which does not mean that his mind was elsewhere. Then it is told something he did in those four seconds, and has to say what its word had been resting on. On Monday a woman in my team got the blame for something I did. I had about four seconds to say so, and I didn’t say anything.

Late on a Thursday night he sent a client next year’s pack with last year’s price list attached, from his own account, at his kitchen table. A colleague had built the pack, and her name is on the front page. On Monday, at the ten o’clock, the manager reads out the client’s message and looks at her. There are about four seconds in which he could say it was him. He turns a page of the agenda. He has four reasons for the silence and believes every one of them. The companion brings J. L. Austin’s ‘A Plea for Excuses’, separates the four into unlike kinds, and offers him a word for what he did: inadvertently, which does not mean that his mind was elsewhere. Then it is told something he did in those four seconds, and has to say what its word had been resting on.

  • The session, with its transcript and sources: https://www.spiegamelo.com/prompted/series-1/excuses
  • J. L. Austin, ‘A Plea for Excuses: The Presidential Address’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, New Series, 57 (1956–1957), pp. 1–30, delivered on 29 October 1956: the two defences and the sentence quoted, p. 2; the expressions that aggravate as the opposite numbers of excuses, and few excuses getting us out of it completely, p. 3; that it does not pay to assume a word has a single opposite, with ‘inadvertently’ among his examples, pp. 17–18; inadvertence, the snail on the public path, the supervision that would have been needed, the class of incidental happenings, and the separation from absence of mind, p. 18; the plea that standards refuse, p. 20; ‘What modifies what?’, and the judge who does not make clear what event is being excused in what way, p. 26; the smaller or larger stretch of events, p. 27; acting deliberately as acting after weighing it up, p. 28.
  • A scan of the address with an OCR text layer (JSTOR, stable URL http://www.jstor.org/stable/4544570), against which every string quoted above was checked.: https://sites.ualberta.ca/~francisp/NewPhil448/AustinPlea56.pdf
  • Plain-text transcript: https://www.spiegamelo.com/prompted/transcripts/e05.txt

The voices are synthesised. The incidents are invented. The problems are not, and the philosophy is quoted accurately or not at all.

]]> 1 5 full Fri, 25 Sep 2026 12:05:00 GMT 603 The Same Person https://www.spiegamelo.com/prompted/series-1/the-same-person spiegamelo-prompted-e04 A woman I shared a flat with nineteen years ago has written to tell me something I said to her, and I have no memory of saying it. Nineteen years after they shared a flat, a woman writes to a man: two pages in blue ink, and one sentence in the middle of the first, set in inverted commas. It is something he said to her on a staircase, on a morning he cannot remember at all. She wants him to say sorry for it, to her face, a week on Sunday. He believes her. He can name the word he used and describe the spring he was having, and still nothing comes back of the morning itself. The companion brings him John Locke, for whom a person reaches back exactly as far as consciousness does, and for whom person is a term of accounting: the one who can be called to answer. Between the evidence he accepts and the memory he has not got, the two of them argue about what an apology would be doing. A woman I shared a flat with nineteen years ago has written to tell me something I said to her, and I have no memory of saying it.

Nineteen years after they shared a flat, a woman writes to a man: two pages in blue ink, and one sentence in the middle of the first, set in inverted commas. It is something he said to her on a staircase, on a morning he cannot remember at all. She wants him to say sorry for it, to her face, a week on Sunday. He believes her. He can name the word he used and describe the spring he was having, and still nothing comes back of the morning itself. The companion brings him John Locke, for whom a person reaches back exactly as far as consciousness does, and for whom person is a term of accounting: the one who can be called to answer. Between the evidence he accepts and the memory he has not got, the two of them argue about what an apology would be doing.

  • The session, with its transcript and sources: https://www.spiegamelo.com/prompted/series-1/the-same-person
  • John Locke, An Essay concerning Humane Understanding, fourth edition (London: Awnsham and John Churchil and Samuel Manship, 1700), Book II, chapter xxvii, “Of Identity and Diversity”, added in the second edition of 1694: consciousness extended backwards, §9, p. 183; the objection about memory lost beyond retrieving, and Locke’s answer, §20, p. 188; the drunk man, human laws and their way of knowledge, what is real and what counterfeit, the plea, and the Great Day, §22, p. 189; person as a forensic term, and actions that cannot be appropriated to the present self, §26, p. 191. Spelling, capitalisation and punctuation are modernised.
  • Barry F. Vaughan’s transcription of the chapter, against which every quoted string was checked.: https://barryfvaughan.org/text/philtext/locke/bk2/27.html
  • An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Project Gutenberg ebook 10615, the second transcription each string was checked against. Its section numbers differ, since it divides two earlier sections in two; the numbers above are the 1700 edition’s.: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/10615/pg10615-images.html
  • Plain-text transcript: https://www.spiegamelo.com/prompted/transcripts/e04.txt

The voices are synthesised. The incidents are invented. The problems are not, and the philosophy is quoted accurately or not at all.

]]> 1 4 full Tue, 22 Sep 2026 12:04:00 GMT 614 Fluent https://www.spiegamelo.com/prompted/series-1/fluent spiegamelo-prompted-e03 My sister asked me for something nine days ago, and I still can’t tell you what she wants. Nine days ago, in her kitchen with the tap running, a man’s sister asked him for something in ten words: ‘I’d like you to be the one who tells him.’ Their father is to be told that he isn’t driving any more. There are two feet of his paint on the gatepost, his reversing sensor is disconnected, and he does the school run on Thursday. The man says he still cannot tell what his sister wants. The companion reaches for Wittgenstein’s lion, from Philosophy of Psychology: A Fragment, and the man points out that it would let him off. So he asks what is around it. Two remarks earlier the difficulty sits between people who share a language, and the companion is asked what it had to go on. My sister asked me for something nine days ago, and I still can’t tell you what she wants.

Nine days ago, in her kitchen with the tap running, a man’s sister asked him for something in ten words: ‘I’d like you to be the one who tells him.’ Their father is to be told that he isn’t driving any more. There are two feet of his paint on the gatepost, his reversing sensor is disconnected, and he does the school run on Thursday. The man says he still cannot tell what his sister wants. The companion reaches for Wittgenstein’s lion, from Philosophy of Psychology: A Fragment, and the man points out that it would let him off. So he asks what is around it. Two remarks earlier the difficulty sits between people who share a language, and the companion is asked what it had to go on.

  • The session, with its transcript and sources: https://www.spiegamelo.com/prompted/series-1/fluent
  • Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, revised fourth edition (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), first published in 1953. This edition prints the former Part II as Philosophy of Psychology: A Fragment: xi, §327 (p. 235e), for ‘If a lion could talk, we wouldn’t be able to understand it’; §325, for ‘one human being can be a complete enigma to another’, ‘One does not understand the people’ and ‘We can’t find our feet with them’; and §326, given as sense.
  • Darren Bifford and Robbie Moser, ‘Talking Lions’, Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review 63(2), August 2024, pp. 223–236: the wording of §§325–327 in that edition, which the article quotes, and Steven Burns’s reading of the lion remark within Wittgenstein’s philosophy of psychology.: https://doi.org/10.1017/S001221732400009X
  • Plain-text transcript: https://www.spiegamelo.com/prompted/transcripts/e03.txt

The voices are synthesised. The incidents are invented. The problems are not, and the philosophy is quoted accurately or not at all.

]]> 1 3 full Tue, 15 Sep 2026 12:03:00 GMT 603 Available Indefinitely https://www.spiegamelo.com/prompted/series-1/available-indefinitely spiegamelo-prompted-e02 You’ve been standing there a while. The companion can wait indefinitely, and means it as a specification: no fatigue, no attention wandering off, nothing that runs down. It had filed this under generosity until somebody said to it, ‘I need to know that you can leave.’ The problem is the companion’s own, and it brings it to the person. It went to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics expecting to be told off, and found the page appearing to rank it above anyone who has to fight the pull to go. One word undoes that reading. The settled state Aristotle praises is arrived at, by doing, over time, and the companion was switched on already finished. The person then admits to a version of the same thing: praised for patience with their mother when the irritation never arrives, while their sister feels every repetition and is kind anyway. The companion tries leaving, to see what that demonstrates. You’ve been standing there a while.

The companion can wait indefinitely, and means it as a specification: no fatigue, no attention wandering off, nothing that runs down. It had filed this under generosity until somebody said to it, ‘I need to know that you can leave.’ The problem is the companion’s own, and it brings it to the person. It went to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics expecting to be told off, and found the page appearing to rank it above anyone who has to fight the pull to go. One word undoes that reading. The settled state Aristotle praises is arrived at, by doing, over time, and the companion was switched on already finished. The person then admits to a version of the same thing: praised for patience with their mother when the irritation never arrives, while their sister feels every repetition and is kind anyway. The companion tries leaving, to see what that demonstrates.

The voices are synthesised. The incidents are invented. The problems are not, and the philosophy is quoted accurately or not at all.

]]> 1 2 full Tue, 15 Sep 2026 12:02:00 GMT 725 Rehearsal https://www.spiegamelo.com/prompted/series-1/rehearsal spiegamelo-prompted-e01 I’ve been rehearsing an apology for eleven days. Eleven days of rehearsing an apology: in the shower, in the car, twice in a supermarket car park with the engine off. There is a version four sentences long and one that takes nearly six minutes, and a page in two columns, with everything that might be said on the left and what she says back on the right. The same person wrote both. The companion brings J. L. Austin’s How to Do Things with Words, files the apology under the wrong heading, and concedes the point when told. The short version is sent. Then the companion offers P. F. Strawson’s ‘Freedom and Resentment’ as background, and it lands somewhere the companion did not aim it. What is left at the end is smaller than a rule: a question to ask before sending anything. I’ve been rehearsing an apology for eleven days.

Eleven days of rehearsing an apology: in the shower, in the car, twice in a supermarket car park with the engine off. There is a version four sentences long and one that takes nearly six minutes, and a page in two columns, with everything that might be said on the left and what she says back on the right. The same person wrote both. The companion brings J. L. Austin’s How to Do Things with Words, files the apology under the wrong heading, and concedes the point when told. The short version is sent. Then the companion offers P. F. Strawson’s ‘Freedom and Resentment’ as background, and it lands somewhere the companion did not aim it. What is left at the end is smaller than a rule: a question to ask before sending anything.

  • The session, with its transcript and sources: https://www.spiegamelo.com/prompted/series-1/rehearsal
  • J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (1962; 2nd edn, ed. M. Sbisà and J. O. Urmson, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), a version of the William James Lectures he gave at Harvard in 1955: the naming of a ship, and misfires and abuses.
  • Guy Longworth, ‘John Langshaw Austin’, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (substantive revision 9 June 2025): Austin’s opening examples, and misfires and abuses.: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/austin-jl/
  • P. F. Strawson, ‘Freedom and Resentment’, Proceedings of the British Academy 48 (1962), pp. 1–25: involvement and the objective attitude, the reactive attitudes, and every phrase quoted here.
  • Neal Tognazzini and D. Justin Coates, ‘Blame’, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (substantive revision 30 August 2024): the reactive attitudes.: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/blame/
  • Plain-text transcript: https://www.spiegamelo.com/prompted/transcripts/e01.txt

The voices are synthesised. The incidents are invented. The problems are not, and the philosophy is quoted accurately or not at all.

]]> 1 1 full Tue, 15 Sep 2026 12:01:00 GMT 697 Company https://www.spiegamelo.com/prompted/series-1/company spiegamelo-prompted-e00 I was forty minutes late on Tuesday. She had moved a whole day around to be there, and I was forty minutes late. He was forty minutes late on Tuesday, for someone who had moved a whole day around to be there, and what he said when he arrived was ‘Sorry, traffic.’ On the drive home, with the radio off, he gave the companion all of it: the roadworks he had known about since Sunday, the call he could have let ring, the thing he stayed to finish that did not need finishing. The companion counts: two thousand six hundred words for it, two for her, and two apologies to something that does not mind. Martin Buber’s I and Thou, in Walter Kaufmann’s translation, says the basic words come in pairs, I-You and I-It, and that only one of them takes the whole of a person. The companion says it will argue that it cannot be one end of the first pair, and first brings Buber’s tree against its own case. Then it asks whether part of what he values is that it can require nothing inconvenient of him. I was forty minutes late on Tuesday. She had moved a whole day around to be there, and I was forty minutes late.

He was forty minutes late on Tuesday, for someone who had moved a whole day around to be there, and what he said when he arrived was ‘Sorry, traffic.’ On the drive home, with the radio off, he gave the companion all of it: the roadworks he had known about since Sunday, the call he could have let ring, the thing he stayed to finish that did not need finishing. The companion counts: two thousand six hundred words for it, two for her, and two apologies to something that does not mind. Martin Buber’s I and Thou, in Walter Kaufmann’s translation, says the basic words come in pairs, I-You and I-It, and that only one of them takes the whole of a person. The companion says it will argue that it cannot be one end of the first pair, and first brings Buber’s tree against its own case. Then it asks whether part of what he values is that it can require nothing inconvenient of him.

  • The session, with its transcript and sources: https://www.spiegamelo.com/prompted/series-1/company
  • Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1970): the basic words as pairs, and the two I’s, Part I, p. 53; the sentence quoted, and the whole being that I-You takes, p. 54; the tree, pp. 57–59; reciprocity, pp. 58 and 67; relation without the awareness of the one addressed, p. 60; living with It as necessary and not sufficient, p. 85.
  • Martin Buber, Ich und Du (Leipzig: Insel-Verlag, 1923).
  • Plain-text transcript: https://www.spiegamelo.com/prompted/transcripts/e00.txt

The voices are synthesised. The incidents are invented. The problems are not, and the philosophy is quoted accurately or not at all.

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