Eliran Haziza, a philosophy graduate student at the University of Toronto, wrote a haiku-detecting program and ran it on philosophy texts.

He previously shared some of the wonderful results with us in a comment on a previous post earlier this year.

This time, his program scanned around 3000 papers from 33 philosophy journals that were published either online or in print in 2019 (he notes that in some journals, papers that were published in print in 2019 had already been published online 2 or 3 years earlier).

He says: “My program found several thousand haiku. Many were automatically filtered out. I saved around 200 that were decent. I hand picked the 25 best. Some are funny. Some are absurd. Some are just too good. Overall they paint a certain picture of academic philosophy.”

Hideo Hagiwara, “Early Spring”

Philosophy Haiku 2019
by Eliran Haziza

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Distress. An agent
has to decide how to act
when much is at stake.

— Yitzhak Benbaji & Susanne Burri
“Civilian Immunity Without
the Doctrine of Double Effect”
Utilitas

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Tim and Tom both work
at Chase bank, far away from
a river with geese.

— Travis Timmerman
“A dilemma for Epicureanism”
Philosophical Studies

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Suppose I throw a
cat at a window, causing
the window to break.

— Naomi Thompson
“Is Building Built?”
Analysis

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There are oranges
on the table that number
both two and one half.

— Eric Snyder & Jefferson Barlew
“How To Count 2½ Oranges”
Australasian Journal of Philosophy

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If the water in
the lake rises much
higher, Sally’s home will flood.

— Joseph Len Miller
“Decolonizing the demarcation
of the ethical”
Philosophical Studies

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In the right panel,
a second figure, also
seated, faces left.

— Richard Hughes Gibson
“Signs of Friendship: A Response to
Alexander Nehamas’s ‘The Good of Friendship’”
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society

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I don’t ever want
to make even a single
mistake in grading.

— Daniel Immerman
“Moral pickles, moral dilemmas,
and the obligation preface paradox”
Philosophical Studies

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Our world is but
one of a plurality
of possible worlds.

— Byron Simmons
“Fundamental non-qualitative properties”
Synthese

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I’m grateful to an
anonymous reviewer
for pointing this out.

— Casey Rebecca Johnson
“Investigating illocutionary monism”
Synthese

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Extensional: Is
it possible for John to
touch a unicorn?

— Justin D’Ambrosio
“Semantic Verbs Are Intensional Transitives”
Mind

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Maybe coming up
with the concept race was no
good for anyone.

— Jared Riggs
“Review of Justin Remhof, Nietzsche’s
Constructivism: A Metaphysics of Material Objects”
Journal of Nietzsche Studies

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Carl, hating David
and wanting him dead, pushes
David in the lake.

— Kimberly Kessler Ferzan
“Deontological distinction in war”
Ethics

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While driving, I see
a car pull out into my
lane: I hit the brakes.

— Mohan Matthen
“Objects, seeing, and object-seeing”
Synthese

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Things go from strange to
stranger when we think about
justification.

— Clayton Littlejohn & Julien Dutant
“Justification, knowledge, and normality”
Philosophical Studies

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Imagine someone
who wants to buy a modern,
elegant kettle.

— Claudia Picazo Jaque
“Are mental representations
underdeterminacy-free?”
Synthese

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If it’s going to
rain, Ahmed wants you to take
the big umbrella.

— Ethan Jerzak
“Two ways to want?”
Journal of Philosophy

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I must realise
that the bear is after me
before I can flee.

— Léa Salje
“The essential non-indexical”
Philosophers’ Imprint

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When I leave the room,
the tomato does not lose
its colour or shape.

— Umrao Sethi
“Sensible over-determination”
Philosophical Quarterly

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We are angry at
Volkswagen Group for cheating
emissions standards.

— Luis Cheng-Guajardo
“Responsibility unincorporated: corporate
agency and moral responsibility”
Philosophical Quarterly

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There is no spatial
counterpart to our sense
of temporal flow.

— Thomas Sattig
“The sense of temporal flow:
a higher-order account”
Philosophical Studies

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She got the drinks and
the idea. Bob lost his
coat and his temper.

— Meg Wallace
“The polysemy of ‘part’”
Synthese

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I myself used to
be a hard determinist,
since my high-school days.

— Christian Helmut Wenzel
“Review of Alfred R. Mele, Manipulated Agents:
A Window to Moral Responsibility”
Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

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The end of aimless
ambling may be just that:
aimless ambling.

— Barbara Vetter
“Are abilities dispositions?”
Synthese

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Breaking camp on a
windy day, Hiker leaves a
campfire burning.

— Martin Montminy
“Derivative culpability”
Canadian Journal of Philosophy

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I would like to thank
all the audiences for
their helpful feedback.

— Jan Heylen
“Factive knowability and the
problem of possible omniscience”
Philosophical Studies