Friday, July 31, 2009

Philosophy in the Blogosphere

There's a lot of it.

(Before I forget: The 94th Philosophers' Carnival is up at "Parableman". I liked Jonathan Ichikawa's post about on 'experimental philosophy'.)

Brian Leiter was asked to write his top ten list for philosophy blogs (ht). Here's his list, which is a fairly good one:

Certain Doubts
Experimental Philosophy
Leiter Reports
Manyul Im's Chinese Philosophy Blog
PEA Soup
Philosophy, et cetera
Public Reason
The Garden of Forking Paths
The Prosblogion
Think Tonk

It's heavy on group blogs, but that makes sense for a top ten list -- most non-group philosophy blogs are either on a very narrow topic, and thus would be odd to put in a top ten list, or are philosophy-among-other-things blogs, which makes them very hard to compare. Manyul Im, Richard Chappell, and Clayton Littlejohn are all excellent exceptions. (I think John Wilkins's Evolving Thoughts is another candidate, as is Eric Schwitzgebel's The Splintered Mind, being good philosophy blogs with potentially wide appeal. For similar reasons, In Socrates' Wake would be a good candidate on the group blog side, and I'm rather partial to the Feminist Philosophers blog. And the list, of course, could go on, on both sides; the difficulty lies in weeding down excellent candidates to ten choices rather than in stretching to come up with ten.)

For some reason I don't think philosophy has quite taken as easily to blogging as, say, history has; I'm not sure why that is (assuming that it is so). Perhaps historians, used to having to deal with massive amounts of detail, are more comfortable working in snippets? I don't know. But I think most people would find most of the blogs above worth at least an occasional browse.