Too Much Philosophy?, part 1 Is there too much philosophy being written and/or published today?

The technological impediments to distributing philosophy are getting less and less problematic all the time. We can safely predict that the volume of material published that is, in some sense philosopy, will be increasing all the time.

Of course, it depends on what you mean by published philosophy.

At one end, we have blogosophy. Some signal might appear in this noise, but for the sake of argument, let's consider the one extreme of blogosophy, the person who's writing to figure something out for themselves, trying to find the flaws or hidden implications in something they're reading or just developingan argument for the joy of it. Frankly, I don't think that there can be too much of this sort of writing. In the past, it may have been limited to private journals or little slips of paper that were never revisited even by their authors. Only the form has changed.

The change in format has much to offer. Since a lot (most?) web rants go unread, there's little particular harm, and perhaps the blogger does find an audience of one or two. Maybe its not even the quality of argument or presentation that produces the audience but a simple agreement to read each other's wanderings. This sort of small community has a great deal of promise. So much so that I encourage my students to keep on-line journals and to share their urls. This sort of learning community, especially focused by common texts and the discipline of a syllabus, could be a very good thing indeed. The study group moves on line, and what's lost in terms of immediacey is made up for by the care that writing requires. Even in the relatively twitchy world of the internet, putting thoughts into words requires a care and attention that speaking spontaneously to someone present who's already keyed into the non-verbal parts of a conversation just does not possess. For some, there's a definite need to seek out the sort of human contact embodied in a conversation. For many, certainly myself as an undergraduate, the careful consideration required when writing for others to read is even more lacking.

So, here's one form of writing philosophically that's bound to increase greatly in the short term future, but I'd be hard pressed to say that's approaching a level that could be called "too much". Of course, even though these discussions could be called "philosophy", and the possibility of world wide distribution does constitute a sort of "publishing", they are not what's generally understood by the term "published philosophy". More on these other sorts of things will be presented in future posts.
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