I've Been Prompted

About I've Been Prompted

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.

Publisher

Lorenzo Vigentini

Category

society & culture

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

15 Sept 2026

Latest episode

23 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

14 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   23 Oct 2026

   Not Yet

   It said, in my handwriting: present to follow. Nothing has followed it. A card left on the gift table at a wedding fourteen months ago, in his own handwriting: present to follow. Nothing has followed it, and on Saturday the couple are coming to his flat for dinner, at his invitation. He has had their list open more times than he could tell anyone, with two things sitting in a basket, one of them a good deal dearer than the other; once he reached the page that asks for the long number and closed the tab; and every Sunday evening, at the bottom of the diary page, he thinks: this week. The companion brings Book Three of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, where wish relates to the end and choice to the means, and hears that Sunday sentence, and his saying he still means it, as naming an end and no act. Then it completes his deliberation for him in Aristotle’s own order, from the doctor who does not deliberate whether he shall heal to an object of choice already determinate, on the assumption that his end was fixed on the morning he wrote the card. He has two dates for the two things in the basket, and giving them costs each of them something.

2. 

   20 Oct 2026

   Diversion

   Every Thursday I collect my son from swimming. I get there ten minutes before he’s out, on purpose, and then I can’t stay in the car for the ten minutes. Ten minutes in a car park every Thursday, arrived at on purpose and impossible to sit through. He collects his son from swimming, turns the engine off and gets straight out: a row of garages, the back of the leisure centre, a noticeboard in the foyer with nothing on it he needs and read all the way down, and a chocolate bar from the machine by the door that is usually still in his coat when they get home. Last Thursday the session finished early, the boy came out to an empty car and asked where he goes, and was told it was just stretching his legs. The companion brings Pascal’s long note on diversion: the philosophers who think a whole day spent chasing a hare unreasonable and scarce know our nature, the hunters who do not know that it is the chase and not the quarry they seek, a king left with nothing to divert him, and the sentence about men who cannot stay quietly in their own chamber. It finds the same arrangement in the radio, the podcast and the list, takes the bar for the hare, and then answers the boy’s question with the reason Pascal gives for the chamber, at the size of a mortal condition, quoting the man out after a boar in support of how far the account reaches.

3. 

   16 Oct 2026

   Bad Luck

   On Saturday night I reversed over my friend’s cat, on her drive. A cat reversed over at walking pace on a friend’s drive on Saturday night, after a look underneath with the torch on a phone found nothing there, and four apologies since that have changed nothing for the man who made them. His friend answers each one that it could have been anyone’s car, everyone he has told says he ought to stop saying sorry, and he agrees with all of them and walks round to her door again. The companion brings Bernard Williams’s 1976 paper ‘Moral Luck’ and its lorry driver who, through no fault of his, runs over a child: the feeling Williams calls agent-regret, which is by no means restricted to voluntary agency, and which people will rightly try to move a driver out of, though some doubt would be felt about a driver who moved too blandly or readily to the place of a spectator. Then it casts the evening into the parts of the example, with the friend among the people who comfort and the apologies as the action that expresses the feeling, and offers that as a reading of the example and not as advice from Williams.

4. 

   13 Oct 2026

   The Shorter Way Round

   I sold my car at the weekend, to a man who came from the advert, and the clutch slips. A car sold at the weekend to a man who came from the advert, and the clutch slips. Asked out the front whether it had given him any trouble, the seller said it had sailed through its annual safety check in March, which it had, and the check does not cover the clutch. The buyer said that would do him, folded away the questions he had written on an envelope, took it round the block and paid. The companion brings H. P. Grice’s ‘Logic and Conversation’, which separates what a man says from what he implies by saying it, and works the buyer’s side out step by step: the presumption that the seller was cooperating, the maxim about being as informative as is required, and the first item on Grice’s list of ways to fail one, the quiet violation liable to mislead. Then it draws the line between misleading and lying where two philosophers who came after Grice draw it, Timmermann and Viebahn, and finds something in the seller’s favour.

5. 

   9 Oct 2026

   The Reminder

   A man at work asked me where he ought to go in Brittany, and I sent him to an afternoon I’d written down as the best of my week there. Four years of small notebooks, a couple of months in each, all on one shelf. A man at work asked where he ought to go in Brittany, and he sent him to an afternoon he had written down three summers ago as the best of the week: the harbour wall out to the lighthouse, rain from about three, fish soup by the slipway. Then he was asked what was so good about it, and said the view, before he had thought about it. There is nothing in the notebook about a view, and he does not know where he got it from. The companion brings the story Socrates tells in Plato’s Phaedrus, where the king of Egypt hears out the god who has invented letters and tells him he has found an elixir not of memory, but of reminding. What follows turns on what came back from within, and what came only off the page.

6. 

   6 Oct 2026

   Under a Description

   I’m putting a new fence up between my garden and next door’s: six foot, close-board, the whole length, where the old one came up to my chest. A new fence is going up between two gardens: six foot of close-board where the old one came up to his chest, the posts already in and the panels due on Friday. Next door has a greenhouse at the bottom of his garden, and on Sunday he stood looking at the posts and said that was his tomatoes finished. The man ordered in August, knowing where the greenhouse stood, and the yard will still swap the panels for shorter ones with a foot of trellis on top, up to twelve on Friday. The companion brings G. E. M. Anscombe’s Intention, in which one action can carry many descriptions at once, and a man pumping poisoned water gives four of them in a line, each the means to the next. It lines the man’s reasons up the same way, puts next door’s tomatoes among them, and is asked where it got that.

7. 

   2 Oct 2026

   Attention

   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.

8. 

   28 Sept 2026

   What I Would Rather Want

   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.

9. 

   25 Sept 2026

   Excuses

   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.

10. 

    22 Sept 2026

    The Same Person

    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.

11. 

    15 Sept 2026

    Fluent

    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.

12. 

    15 Sept 2026

    Available Indefinitely

    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.

13. 

    15 Sept 2026

    Rehearsal

    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.

14. 

    15 Sept 2026

    Company

    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.

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