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September 9, 2003
Things have been a bit slow in posting at philosophy.com the last week or so because I have been involved in setting up philosophical conversations to help nurture a philosophical culture in Adelaide. That culture has pretty much died in the 3 universities in Adelaide and exists only in the margins.
It has taken more time that I'd expected even though I've been more or less giving Trevor Maddock a hand. Trevor is an ex-colleague and we once taught Critical Theory (Frankfurt School) together.
The weblog is an attempt to help the philosophical discussion going on civil society that currently exists in the interlinkages of European Studies at the University of Adelaide, the cafe philosophy that has been going for five years and Experimental Art Foundation and Dark Horsey Bookshop. The latter has been running a forum on the aesthetics of narrative.
Hopefully the conversation that happens through various talks in, and around, French and German writers and philosophers will continue online and broaden out to take in people from other cities who are interested in or working in this continental philosophical culture. To facilitate that conversation an online library of relevant texts---many have been collected by Trevor and stored on his computer at home---- will be added.
This is necessary because a lot of work that is collected by an academic about a particular philosopher--e.g, Bataille---can simply disappear into a black hole. All that work just gone. I presume it happens when an academic moves university and the collected articles and writings are then taken down from the old server. There today gone tomorrow. In addition, texts don’t stay on the net the way they sit on library shelves. The virtual libraries that do exist cost a lot to access.
The other aspect of this is that not much philosophy is actually being published on the net. Unlike the legal institution, where a huge amount of work is published online (judging from Lawrence Solum's Legal Theory weblog), most philosophy is locked up in journals that present closed fronts to non-subscribers. Philosophers have been slow to embrace electronic publishing, academic journals have resisted it, and universities have pretty much given up facilitating the spread of scholarly knowledge for the common good. Academic publishing is about restricted access, intellectual property, business and reputation. The academic publishing world needs to change.
Philosophical conversations is an experiment. It is a way for philosophy to provoke and mobilise thinking and so help to open up diverse modes of thinking and writing. It is a way to learn to think differently.
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