In existence since May 1999.
Please use the following headings to navigate round this page, and hence round this whole site:
December 2007: Added Nihilism and Eclecticism: Negation as Position. (Playful transfiguration of a usenet discussion.)
September 2007: Added Commentary on Rawls's Theory of Justice. (Little more than a few jottings initially.)
June 2007: Added Abuses of Philosophy.
May 2006: Added discussion on Solipsism Theory with Richard Kulisz from the Why clublet wiki.
April 2006: Added commentary on R G Mayor's book Reason and Common Sense which was originally put on a wiki site.
February 2006: Introduced measures to thwart a spammer flooding the guestbook. Significant developments to Systematic Commentary on Hegel, particularly in The Commentary Further Defined and Divided, although progress slow.
January 2006: Nearly all web pages have been modified, but only a few with significant changes. Added ‘An Attempt at Midwifery’, taken from a thread I participated in in a short-lived e-mailling list.
April 2005: Added four edifying discourses inspired by sermons of Herbert McCabe O.P. (however, all rough, some even incomplete): ‘Being and Explanation’ ‘An Edifying Discourse about a Question’ ‘On Being Edifying’ and ‘Contributing to the Theory’. (Edifying discourses will form a new group of works on this site with their own heading on this page when I have written enough of them. They are light-hearted, short pieces which are not recommended for newcomers to this site, although I am happy to explain about them to those who are interested.)
March 2005: Added Emptying History: The Virgin Mary as Myth by Andrew Murray, with some added comments by myself. This is a copy of the original article to which Emptying Theology: The Virgin Mother as Philosopher was an oblique response. Note that I have been unable to get hold of the author to get permission to copy the article, though I am confident he will not have objections.
September 2004: Added Quaestio de Unitate Ullius Entis and Difficulties with Thomism both written in the Spring of 1982. The first is written in Latin in the style of the first part of an article of Aquinas, where objections (in this case only one objection) are raised before the sed contra and the main body of the article. It was intended for Herbert McCabe O.P., a Thomist. The second is a follow-up to Herbert McCabe’s response.
August 2004: Added Emptying Theology: The Virgin Mother as Philosopher, an article that was a response to an article by Andrew Murray. Also added at the same time, the first two web pages of A history of Philosophy
August 2004: Added A Commentary on ‘Whose Justice? Which Rationality?’ by Alasdair MacIntyre. Also added On Defining Philosophy
As a web site devoted to Philosophy, you will not find much in the way of fancy graphics, nor autobiographical revelations irrelevant to any philosophic discussion which may be found here. All the material, unless indicated to the contrary (so far only an article by Andrew Murray), will have been written by me, that is, by the same human being who is writing this and maintaining this web site. But even this much information is given only in so far as it may assist in understanding the material to be found at this site.
Nevertheless, I shall insist on claiming copyright for the purpose of ensuring that no one else does so, and thereby preventing them from obstructing its disemination or bringing confusion into the debate. (I hope that you will alert me if you suspect I may have infringed on some one else’s copyright.) I am suggesting a copyright analogous to the notion of open source, or general public licence, as used in software distribution. Some works have been published or distributed privately, but these should not present any special copyright problems.
My intentions with regard to copyright may be taken exactly as Peter Suber describes with regard to his own writings – see http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/copyrite.htm.
Much of the material on this web site will refer to famous works in the history of Philosophy, and the reader will be assumed to have those works to hand in English translation. (To facilitate criticism, it might actually be an asset to choose a different translation than the one I have used.)
Entries in the lists below which do not have links refer to texts not yet on this site, but they are already partly written unless I specify otherwise. Some of these are very large, and will not be completed without the help of people who have had the opportunity to study the start I have made.
I have removed from this site what little would have come under this heading. My comments on philosophic material which I find on other personal web sites will not be put on this web site if the original author does not make an adequate response to my comments. My purpose should be to provoke further discussion, not simply to endorse or reject some given position.
I hope to put up some summary of interesting discussions I have found in philosophy newsgroups, irrespective of whether I have contributed anything to those discussions myself.
Since November 1996 I have been monitoring the main philosophy newsgroups:
alt.philosophy, alt.philosophy.debate, sci.philosophy.meta and talk.philosophy.misc.
I have ceased lurking in sci.philosophy.meta since August 2002. At the same time I had a short break from all the newsgroups, and my monitoring of the other groups was less frequent, and therefore patchy after that and ceased completely after January 2003. While there is lots of interesting and entertaining stuff, it takes up too much time finding it, even after filtering out all the cranks, trolls and chatterers. My attention has switched more to e-mailling lists on particular philosophers – particularly on Kant and Hegel. However, although such e-mailling lists are better in many respects, I find them somewhat disappointing too, and even their greater focus has its drawbacks.
I did lurk, and even contribute, for a while in uk.philosophy.misc, not right from its beginning, but perhaps catching it at its peak, but have not lurked there since May 2001.
I have not been a frequent poster to any of the groups, being most active in making contributions during 1999, but little before or since. Also, I lost most of the data collected between July 1997 and October 1998, including the few posts I made myself. I would welcome suggestions for inclusion here, particularly from that period.
Here is an example of usenet philosophy at its best. It occurred in November 1996. Don't be put off by the subject heading of the thread, which is irrelevant to the discussion. I did not contribute to the thread myself, but I might get around to adding my own comments to the copy of it here.
Nihilism and Eclecticism: Negation as Position is a light-hearted transfiguration rendering a somewhat tedious usenet discussion more interesting. I have not attempted to disguise the original participants, and I can supply the original messages if anyone requests them, but you will probably find it more interesting trying to figure out what might have been written than reading what was written.
I have subscribed to a number of philosophy e-mailling lists since 1996, but so far I have only found some lists relating to Kant and to Hegel worth subscribing to. I am not sure if I will put any material relating to those lists on this web site, but I have now put on this web site ‘An Attempt at Midwifery’, a small collection of messages taken from a thread I participated in in a short-lived e-mailling list.
I only discovered in May 2001 about Wikis, a sort of web-based messageboard system developed by Ward Cunningham. A kind of wiki would seem to be the best way to have philosophic discussions on the Internet. At present almost all contributors are computer programmers, but the technology is now such that no programming expertise, or money, is required to run a wiki, let alone contribute to one, so this should change.
Since writing the above things have indeed changed. In particular, Wikipedia, which is a wiki designed to develop an encyclopaedia, has been a huge success and thereby gained broadcast media attention too, but it is not dedicated to Philosophy, and this undermines its contribution to philosophic discussion as anything more than an unreliable reference, much as for other topics it covers. The hegel.net web site have set up a wiki dedicated to Hegel's philosophy. There is now also a wiki called PhiloWiki, which seems to be a sort of offshoot of Wikipedia, perhaps trying to address the sort of concern I have about Wikipedia's unsuitability for Philosophy. I have not really checked it out properly yet. I should be particularly interested to see if and how the discussions at the site can affect how the content at the site gets to be arranged.
My commentary on R G Mayor's book Reason and Common Sense was originally put on the Why clublet wiki site, which site closed in 2004. (Its role seems to have been largely replaced by the wiki the Adjunct, set up in August 2005.) The commentary already contains slightly more than was originally on the wiki. (The commentary did not produce any discussion on the wiki.)
My first contribution to a wiki page was a discussion about Solipsism Theory in the Why clublet with Richard Kulisz following a link which he had given in a Philosophy newsgroup posting. I have combined a number of versions, but I have kept in much of the repetition so that the stages of the discussion can be more easily followed. Versions 4, 11 and 13 were edited by me, while Richard Kulisz edited versions 3, 10, 12 and 14. (Versions 1 and 2 were by Philip Craig, who seems not to have contributed after that.) I have left Richard Kulisz with the last word, but if anyone thinks that Richard Kulisz has raised points in version 14 worth answering, I shall be happy to offer an answer to them. Clearly Ben Kovitz thought that the discussion was going nowhere, since he wiped out everything Richard Kulisz and I had contributed, and that is how it has remained. The discussion was an example of how frustrating philosophic arguments can be.