Some end-of-the-year reflections, a top 10 list of this year's essay, and a big announcement--starting the first Tuesday of January, we'll be offering a philosophy class here for paid subscribers.

NOTE: If you’re impatient for the Nozick class details, skip to the end!

I kicked off this Substack at the end of December 2022. From January 2023 to now, I’ve published 118 essays of my own here (41 in 2023, 43 in 2024, and 34 in 2025) plus guest essays by Tibor Rutar, Eric Levitz, Stefan Bertram-Lee, Matt McManus, Sam Badger, and Jason Myles.

No one’s the best judge of their own work but for whatever it’s worth my own top ten list of the things I wrote here this year, arranged in chronological order, would be:

  1. Taking the Red Pill? William Clare Roberts vs. Vivek Chibber on the Class Matrix

  2. I’m Pretty Sure Feudalism Existed

  3. Philosophers Probably Shouldn’t Respond to Right-Wing Authoritarianism by Limiting the Sphere of Acceptable Inquiry

  4. Marx’s Inferno: What William Clare Roberts Gets Right and Wrong About Capital

  5. Knowing Ryan Lake

  6. Ben Shapiro Tries to Refute Marx Without Reading Him

  7. If You Want to Critique Analytic Philosophy, It Helps to Know Something About It

  8. In Defense of the Fowkes Translation of Marx’s Capital

  9. Fuentes is a Symptom

  10. Missing the Point on Universalism

5 is obviously the one that’s the most meaningful to me, but the rest of the list can be sorted into a few basic categories. The Marx-iest stuff I’ve written here is overrepresented (1, 2, 4, 6, 8). There are also two essays reflecting on the value of either analytic philosophy in particular (7) or philosophy in general (3). (Philosophy for the Left and Ben Shapiro as a Historian of Philosophy would be runners-up in that category.) 9 and 10 are the hardest to classify. The subject matter is somewhere in between core Philosophy for the People content and the kind of thing I’d be more likely to write for Jacobin, but honestly those are some of my own favorite things I’ve written this year.

I should also mention three things I wrote elsewhere this year that feel like they might be of particular interest to Philosophy for the People readers:

In last year’s wrap-up, I was way too optimistic about how much I’d get written for Philosophy for the People in 2025. I said there that a regular week would include both the usual initially free public post on Sunday and a mid-week bonus for paying subscribers. One of the reasons that was too optimistic was that I was then about to start teaching an in-person version of my Capital class in Los Angeles, and I thought I’d just adapt my notes from each lecture in there into mid-week bonus material here.

I did indeed do that class:

No photo description available.

…and it’s not quite done, by the way, if anyone wants to join us for the last few sessions, we’ve always been very open-door about new people joining whenever. (We’re obviously.not meeting on New Years Eve, but otherwise it’s every Wednesday evening at 7 at Cafe Mak in Koreatown, and we probably have four sessions left—one on Ch. 24, one on Ch. 25, which is a beast in terms of page count but is straightforward enough in its core argument that it can be reasonably covered in one session, and then two to slide through the primitive accumulation chapter at the end of the book.) It’s a very good time. I love my Wednesday nights of surplus value talk followed by late-night Korean food. But I ended up deciding that the form the notes were in wasn’t quite ready for being shared that way. Something like that is coming, I promise, and I hope not even in the terribly distant future, but not yet. Stay tuned.

Meanwhile, though, I’m embarrassed to have fallen so far short in terms of what I said I’d produce here this year. The good part is that I actually feel extraordinarily good about what I did produce. I’m doing the same kind of top 10 list in a few days on the GTAA Patreon, and I was going to mix together the Substack and non-Substack writing I did there, but I ended up deciding not to because the list was way too dominated by stuff I’ve written here. As I said, no one’s the best judge of their own work, so take this with plenty of salt, but for whatever it’s worth this year I really do feel like I hit my stride with this particular subcategory of my writing.

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Even so, I need to do something bonus during the week to show a little love to the paid subscribers. And for a variety of reasons it’s not going to be realistic this year to promise bonus essays.1 So here’s what I’m going to do instead:

More or less every Tuesday at 1 PM East Coast/10 AM here on the West Coast, starting on January 6th, I’ll be doing a Zoom philosophy class open to paid subscribers. (I’ve been trying to do all my non-writing non-Rutgers work in the mornings, and between YouTube and the various Capital classes and regularly scheduled driving around between Rosarito and LA, Tuesday is pretty much the only day that made any sense.) You don’t have to sign up on a special tier or anything, just, anyone who’s a regular paid Philosophy for the People subscriber will get the Zoom links every week, and then I’ll post the recordings for them. So, if you’re already a paid subscriber, bless you, and you don’t have do anything new. If you’re free, just upgrade to paid and you’re set. If you’re free and you don’t want any stinking philosophy class, great! Don’t do anything, and regularly scheduled programming will go on exactly as before here every Sunday. If you’d take it but you can’t afford $5 a month…well, the good news is that 19 Starbucks locations are on Unfair Labor Practices strikes right now, so if you buy at least one Starbucks drink a month normally, you should be redirecting it to this anyway! (But seriously, if you want to take it and things really are that tight—I’ve been there, the memories are uncomfortably vivid!—just let me know privately and we can figure something out.) I was going back and forth between a few different ideas about what we might read for this first Substack Philosophy Class, but the idea that I ended up settling on, if only because it sounded like such an interesting departure from all the classes where we’ve read books I like and agree with, is this:

Anarchy, State, and Utopia First ...

We’re going to read one chapter a week of Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State & Utopia. Nozick is a very good and fun writer, and genuinely a very smart philosopher, and I absolutely despise his core conclusions, so it sounded like a lot of fun to me to carefully and methodologically work our way through his libertarian masterpiece, thinking our way through all the arguments and where they might go wrong. In a way, it feels to me like a chance to do the philosophy class version of the old Debunk segments I used to do every week on The Michael Brooks Show.

So, again, if that doesn’t interest you, do nothing and nothing will change! But if that does sound fun to you, upgrade to paid (or if you’re already paid, just wait for the first email) and I’ll see you the first Tuesday of January at 1 PM EST/10 AM PST. (Or of course if you have the kind of job where you can’t have something on in the background, you can watch the Zoom recordings after, send me questions you want us to talk about during the next one, etc.) I’ve also confirmed that we’ll have at least one other philosophy professor joining us for these sessions. (Someone who should be familiar to long-time GTAA viewers.) It should be a good time.

Thanks for reading Philosophy for the People w/Ben Burgis! This post is public so feel free to share it.

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For one thing, while nothing’s settled yet, it’s possible that I’m about to taken on an exciting but massively time-consuming new writing project that I’m going to have to be cagey about for the moment, but if it happens, I’ll be lucky to come close to maintaining the same schedule of normal writing in 2026 that I did in 2025.

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