Sharon has an interesting post at Early Modern Notes speculating about philosophy and the internet. I think she's completely right; the internet is a very limited tool for the needs of philosophy. It has the value of accessibility and so it is good for archiving and cross-referencing and other things along those lines. And one sees this at, for instance, Brian Weatherson's "Online Papers in Philosophy," which is probably the most valuable source of information about philosophical research on the web (largely epistemology, philosophy of science, and so forth). But it's difficult to do top-notch philosophy on the internet; blogging has perhaps gone some way toward remedying that, but blogging requires small snippets, and it's very easy to oversimplify a philosophical argument to a dangerous extent in the context of a weblog. This is one reason why I keep insisting that posts here at Siris are only roughed out, and are never finished arguments so much as pollen or seeds of thought. The best that can be had out of it are fragments only. There's a use to fragments; but they are not the whole thing.
Actually, I think this may be a general problem for philosophy. Journal articles, for instance, are very flexible and useful, but I think they show their limits, too, when it comes to philosophy; at least, I find in very noticeable in the work I do. Journal articles are fragments, too; they are polished fragments with standard conventions, but they are partial and fragmentary. And this is perfectly fine but there also is a sense in which philosophy needs to be done holistically: everything starts have ramifications for everything else. If, for instance, you reject a premise in (say) Aquinas's First Mover argument for the existence of God, that has immediate logical consequences for one's view of the natural world, causation, the sort of science that can be done, what style of arguments you can or cannot use, &c., &c. Nothing is hermetically sealed (fortunately, there are ways to handle this, if you keep on your toes, but it's a problem that constantly looms). So, while we are condemned to fragmentary work, we can never rest satisfied with the fragments, which means we are always being forced to evaluate and re-evaluate each thing in light of all the other fragments. Ultimately philosophy has the quirk that the only tool well-suited for it is the brain itself....
I'm not sure how coherent this is (I'm feeling it's way too early right now....)
Brandon
