If you meet a philosopher who posted last year, don’t walk past them: thank them for their service. You’re in the presence of a veteran of the Clarity Wars of 2025—a grisly contretemps that nearly tore Substack apart. My own salvo—a critique of Judith Butler and Ellie Anderson—turned out all right, I thought. Even better, it gave rise to the matchless hit piece “What Ellie Anderson Actually Did and What Daniel Muñoz Cannot See,” in which J. Edward Hackett accuses me of being “methodologically blind”—a “self-appointed graduate of MIT” repeating “the sins of his origin.” I don’t think any essay has ever brought me such joy. Until now. I’ll skip to the best part, because it’s just that good. Here is the ultimate paragraph of Dr. Ana Vieyra’s “On a recent controversy regarding clarity in philosophical writing,” published last January in Epoché. Allow me to end in a rather dramatic and perhaps hyperbolic tone. I believe it is the tone that the severity of the topic merits. Philosophy, along with religion, is among the last corners where logos is allowed to thrive. While Butler might not be the best example of what the philosophical craft has to offer, Muñoz, consciously or unconsciously, perhaps of no fault of his own but as a result of institutional mechanisms, is an agent of the death of philosophy itself. At least it’s not my fault (perhaps). Vieyra concludes: The poison of efficiency-based thinking is the death of meaning itself. What passes off as a sober defense of clarity is further evidence that we live in times of logocide. Maybe it’s the methodological blindness talking, but I’ll be honest: I didn’t see this coming. I thought I was just making banal points about why it’s good to write clearly. I didn’t expect to become walking proof that ours is an era of conceptual murder—specifically, that of logos (Greek for reason), not to mention meaning itself. How did we get from “clarity good” to “philosophy dead”? Vieyra opens the murder trial with some low-drama...