Virginia Weaver, Senior Staff Writer   

Microwaved Beef is a column by Virginia Weaver that reflects on flashpoints from the last few years in the culture wars. The rapid pace of contemporary discourse makes it easy to forget critical moments and trends that have defined our social and academic lives. Microwaved Beef brings those moments back into the spotlight.  

On November 5, 2025, Daniel Muñoz, former associate professor of philosophy at UNC Chapel Hill and currently senior lecturer at the Australian National University, dispatched a seemingly benign but fateful newsletter from his Substack, Big iff True. The newsletter, “Stop making excuses for unclear writing,” spurred drama of a kind typically unheard of in philosophy blogging spaces.  

The gist of “Stop making excuses for unclear writing” is simple: if someone is going to write philosophy, the writing should not obscure the argument. As Muñoz argues, “Ambiguity is nice for poetry and crosswords, and obscurity works for mystics and ciphers. But if you’re giving arguments, your goal should be to make yourself understood.” 

This argument has, perhaps surprisingly, been ongoing for centuries. In his 1728 tract, the Preliminary Discourse on Philosophy in General, influential German philosopher Christian Wolff upholds the position that “the only purpose of philosophical style is to make our meaning clear to the mind of another.” More recently, in 1998, one of the most famous living philosophers, Judith Butler (also a target of Muñoz’s), won a satirical Bad Writing Contest for their dense and allusive prose and, the following year, faced blistering criticism from fellow philosopher Martha Nussbaum, who described Butler’s style as “ponderous and obscure.” 

Nevertheless, the idea that philosophical style ought to be clear remains controversial. Muñoz’s piece came in part in response to a newsletter by public philosopher Ellie Anderson, in which she refers to the desire for clarity as a “fetish.” Anderson’s piece was itself a response to a newsletter by the popular philosophy writer known by the alias Benthams’ Bulldog, which had lambasted certain schools of philosophy for allegedly favoring style over substance.  

The controversy kicked into high gear, however, with Muñoz’s newsletter. Philosophy professor J. Edward Hackett provided, at that point, the most heated response to Muñoz on his blog, which has since become a niche meme. Hackett accuses Muñoz of being “blind methodologically to what Anderson actually did,” and continually brings up his distaste for Muñoz’s alma mater, MIT. Hackett refers to Muñoz as a “self-appointed graduate of MIT,” which seems to imply that he did not actually graduate—a strange accusation.  

Muñoz replied in a comment to Hackett’s post, as well as writing a sarcastic newsletter that collects other responses to his initial arguments and further reacts to Hackett’s screed. In this newsletter, Muñoz encourages moderation in responses to Hackett: “It’s hard not to enjoy the cut-and-thrust of internet discourse,” he writes. “But on the other side of all that is a human being, who probably shouldn’t be reduced to their most unfortunate posts.” 

However, Hackett’s invective proved benign compared to what was to come a few months later. In January 2026, the magazine Epoché published an essay by philosopher Ana Vieyra entitled “On a recent controversy regarding clarity in philosophical writing.” Vieyra argues that writers like Muñoz are ignoring the multifarious purposes of philosophical writing. Rather, she holds that “it might be the case that, in some activities, such as philosophy, being ‘easy’ is not even a virtue.” She concludes:  

“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. 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.” 

The vigor and harsh, accusatory tone of this essay were predictably fascinating to onlookers and merited a response by Muñoz, who expressed confusion at the extremity of Vieyra’s claim.  

“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.” 

At the end of this newsletter, Muñoz expresses his exhaustion with regard to the topic. But this exchange was not truly the end: as a popular writer on the platform Substack, Muñoz has a large readership. Thus, his statuses as a “self-appointed” MIT graduate and an “agent of death” have remained memes, and likely will for a long time. Doubtless, the conversation concerning clarity will carry on too, in the ivory tower and blogs alike, but it may be a while before it again reaches such a fever pitch.