[This is an invited guest post by Justin Weinberg at DailyNous, part of a symposium to celebrate the blog's fifth anniversary. Go read all of it!--ES]
I want to thank Justin for inviting me to participate in this discussion. I hope he forgives me for ignoring Daily Nous, Leiter Reports, Feminist Philosophers (and the rest), which, for present purposes, I’ll treat as ephemera.
When it comes to form and argument, the philosophical blogosphere exhibits little experimentation. This is surprising for four reasons: first, there are a few barriers to entry—it’s not very expensive to set up and maintain a webpage or dedicated site. Second, a few blogs, which clearly aim to attract advertisers, excepted, blogs can be a labor of love and can ignore the commercial need for attracting eyeballs. Third, and most important, hyperlinks and the ability to combine different media liberate philosophy from previous constraints, which, say, impose linearity or ensconce philosophy in written and spoken words.
Most philosophy in the blogosphere—both the outward looking stuff aimed at that magical entity, the public, as well the more recondite material aimed at the professional aficionado—is continuous with lots of pre-internet age philosophy. What’s changed is the potential, instantaneous reach of one’s conversation/dialogue or lecture (e.g., podcasts), which, together with written essays and arguments, can find truly global audiences. Even the well-funded efforts at using the internet to deliver access to courses, both for profit and not-for-profit, have, while making Michael Sandel even more famous (by academic standards) than he was, not transformed the very idea of a philosophy course or a curriculum.
I do not wish to minimize the significance of valuable online resources (e.g., the Stanford Encyclopedia of philosophy, philpapers, books.google, etc.) and the many online communities, which make the study and research of philosophy easier and less isolated. I can access materials at some of the best libraries without leaving my study. I can participate in online discussion of Margaret Cavendish’s philosophy any time of the day with likeminded enthusiasts. Once the algorithms of Google.translate are perfected (in the manner of Star Trek’s universal translator) we can look forward to an even more globalized, philosophy blogosphere. With liberal arts colleges sprouting up all over the world, we are seeing culturally hybrid curricula shaping new kinds of minds. The cosmopolitan in me rejoices and if mankind can survive the century—not a foregone conclusion—the philosophical future seems bright.
Even so, I am baffled we’re not seeing more innovation that deploys the resources of cheap computing power creatively. Little is done to develop philosophy through, say, spatial or multi-dimensional reasoning. The clever use of hyperlinks could show what happens to arguments or premises in subtly different contexts. While there are fantastically inventive visual presentations of information or of people presenting philosophy (and many terrific memes), I am unaware of attempts to change the visual or tactile experience of philosophy on screen or in virtual reality.
Fourth, underlying the puzzle is the assumption that technology and accessibility of new sources of inspiration influence the development of philosophy. Anybody who reads Plato is reminded that Socrates thought it significant that Anaxagoras’ works circulated in scrolls that could be bought (presumably also after his exile)—see Phaedo 97b, and Apology 26de. Plato records for us Socrates’s ambivalence (or worse) about philosophical writings in the Phaedrus 275. To jump to a period I know better, much philosophical innovation by the Novatores who now have familiar names (Hobbes, Descartes, Spinoza, etc.) took place outside universities and monasteries; the riches of early modern philosophy were made possible by the cheapness of print and the relative reliability of logistics. Of course, early analytic philosophy was jumpstarted by breakthroughs in conceptual and inferential tools. And Islamic philosophy by translations from the Greeks, etc.
Surely the time is ripe for a philosophical, avant-garde techno-punk that reboots philosophy outside the academy. During the last decade, there has been a decisive shift in analytic philosophy (our culture’s hegemonic species of philosophy). It used to be that in it knowledge of the cutting edge, or research frontier, of professional philosophy could be mastered by one or two graduate seminars building on a fairly minimal undergraduate curriculum. Now, competent professional philosophers who mind their own business outside the major research universities may find it difficult to understand the arguments in, say, formal epistemology or modal metaphysics. Concept inflation and concept refinement are the characteristics of our age.
My point is not to be critical—I am no enemy of esotericism or the division of labor; but rather to admit that the philosophical historicist in me expects that when philosophy develops subtle refinement and technology can ferment innovation and revolt, the ground will move under our feet.*
*Thanks to Mark Norris Lance John Protevi, and helen de Cruz for encouraging nudges in writing this post.
If Wikipedia is the triumphant domestication of the hypertext link, there were experiments in wilder philosophical forms, but they didn't come to much. I made several myself, using more expansive and self-conscious linking strategies, but never could find readers with the patience to explore them. The largest, the Sprawling Places hypertext, was meant as a landscape to be explored to find new concepts and points of view, but it mainly now functions as a storehouse of references, names, buildings, places that search engines lead people to find, grab, and leave. I think such hypertext experiments weren't radical enough; they were still made of linear verbal subunits.
What may be developing are new formal possibilities using complex pages that have images and propositions and sounds in complex spatially meaningful connections. We find these in art projects, some podcasts, music videos, and my guess is that there are possibilities for new modes of philosophizing somewhere there. But we don't know how to "read" or "evaluate" them yet. What does "criticism" mean in that field, and how would such discourses attain that self-aware responsibility to themselves that philosophy has traditionally demanded? (my dkolb.org lists some relevant texts and experiments but no answers.)
Posted by: David Kolb | 03/08/2019 at 02:26 AM