About

A few words on why this blog exists, and what "inquiry" means here.

This is a small blog about old questions. Not the questions with answers already filed away in an encyclopedia, but the ones that keep reopening every time you think you’ve closed them: what a self is, whether it persists, what we owe each other, and why any of it should matter to someone who will, in a hundred years, be forgotten along with everyone who forgot them.

The writing here moves freely between traditions — Greek, German, and French existentialists sit next to the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, and Nāgārjuna, because the questions were never anyone’s exclusive property. Where a term is easier to think in Sanskrit than in translation, it appears in Devanagari, with a transliteration and gloss alongside it. Where an argument is easier to see in a formula than in prose, it appears in LaTeX. Longer asides live in the margin as sidenotes; citations live at the foot of the page as footnotes. Both are here on purpose, doing different jobs.

Nothing on this site is trying to convince you of a system. It’s trying to think out loud, carefully, in public, in the hope that a stranger’s careful thinking is occasionally useful to your own.

Who’s writing

I’m Pankesh — by day, an engineer; by disposition, someone who has never been able to leave a good question alone. You can find the rest of what I build at pankesh.com.

Colophon

Built with Eleventy, set in League Spartan, Alegreya Sans, and Tiro Devanagari Sanskrit, and searched with Pagefind. No trackers, no newsletter pop-ups, no dark patterns — just essays and, eventually, your notes in the margins.