Philosophistry is ground zero for all my various ideas and projects. The topic of conversation ranges widely and often mixes themes. I’ve talked at length about philosophy, religion, politics, technology, and culture. While this site has, at times, been confessional and journalistic, the format has more in common with essays and poetry than anything else.

Secondarily, this site has been a hub for my web-related activity. People can Google my name and find this site. The site is, in some ways, my presence in a web-based medium. As a result, you will see a lot of things on the side panels and through the menus that resemble more of an extended portfolio.

philosophistry is Latin for the "love of rhetoric."


A retrospective

The site started on March 10th of 2003 with this post describing the word "philosophistry." Since then, the self-expressive essay has become the most common type of post here. The post immediately after that set the tone for the reflexive nature of the site, wherein half of the message here is the act of self-publishing itself. The third post is a hairball theory about Chicxulub (the asteroid that crashed into the Yucatan and extinguished the dinosaurs) and evolution. Since then, I've often floated ideas on Philosophistry, many of which I get embarassed about afterwards. Those three posts were published on the same day from an Internet café in London. I was there alone in Picadilly Circus for a month, and blogging gave me an outlet for my ideas.

In September of 2004, I initiated the BlogFabric. For a quick visual of how it looks like, check out an old re-design (for more info about BlogFabrics, click here). The idea gained the notice of Michael Shanks, an archaeology professor heading up Stanford's MetaMedia Lab, which led to a number of collaborations, including Archaeography and The Burtynsky Exhibit.

February of 2004 was a high-water mark for my involvement in Philosophistry. In this previous design, I exploded my content out to the right, thus making the site more like a map and less like a page. Content was to be found in many nooks, which I programmed as a multiplicity of blogs but represented in different formats: a link blog at the top; an artist thumbnail blog to the right of that; the regular blog below; a piece of poetry (which updated like a blog); and a couple other things that were formatted and updated differently. That design represents an apotheosis of self-publishing, and it emphasizes Marshall McLuhan's idea that "The Medium is the Mesage."

On February 24, 2004, I participated in Grey Tuesday by providing banned mp3s for download on Philosophistry. I recieved a Cease & Desist Letter from EMI, but there were no furthur consequences.

In the summer of 2005, a few of my projects obtained exposure in the blogosphere: Who is in Bernard Goldberg's 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America? And Why?; Flash Map of Attitudes Toward Jews in 12 European Countries; The Perfect Album, by Plastic users (the tally).


Recurring themes

Experiments in publishing - I like to consider half of Philosophistry the content, and the other half meta-content. The way in which things are published, the performative act of self-publishing and self-expression, are a large part of the messages here. For example, this post titled f(x) = g(f(x)) = g(g(f(x))) = g(g(g(f(x)))) = g( ... g(f(x)) ... ), doesn't really tell you much by itself. But in the context of an act that occurred on that particular date that had some motifs of recursion and math is more the point.

Philosophistry as a love of rhetoric - philosophy comes from philos + sophos, which is Greek for the "love of wisdom." philosophistry then is the love of sophisms or deceptive argumentation. This is one of my most frequent post topics. A recent example is an August 19, 2006 post titled "the storage medium of philosophy". My goal is to bring philosophy back to its roots of being a method of investigating wisdom, which is at odds with the typical philosopher's attitude. The typical philosopher, by the nature of having to get papers published and accepted by the academic community, has to assume an inhuman level of accuracy and tightness of logic.

... more themes to follow


Previous site re-designs:

0 - green, Blogger.com template (Mar. '03)
1 - anime Strongbad, flash-heavy look (May)
2 - colored bar, and flash chat (July)
4 - blogroll revolver, and the girl, Movable Type (Aug.)
5 - blogfabric, condensed (Sept.)
6 - blogfabric++, shiny (Oct.)
7 - full blogfabric, and sidebar (Dec.)
8 - huge, map-like layout (Jan. '04)
9a - simple, clean, optimal (Spring '04)
9b - click on ridiculous version for page with web designer humor and disconcordancy (Summer '05)
10 - Design angled toward identity expression ('05 thru '08)