Abstract

Welcome to the Monist Interactive Issue group on “Representation in Electronic Philosophy.” As moderator of this group, I want to say a few things about what we were up to, and to give you the guidelines for participants. First, this was an experiment in doing philosophy. Some of the old rules applied, lots of them did not. The discussion was begun with a “starter paper” written by me. I deliberately kept this paper short, and did not write a “target” paper because I wanted to leave open the possibility that the finished product would be a collaborative effort and not a paper with a set of responses attached to it. The latter is familiar to us and we don’t especially need this new way of doing things to get that result. So my starter paper was written as a sketch, with numbered sections. It was also much looser and informal than my usual way of doing philosophy. It was meant to be suggestive rather than definitive, and participants were free to engage, to ignore, or to add to bits of the starter paper as they saw fit. I was genuinely interested in what form the result of a lengthy, collaborative exchange over electronic channels would look like, and that was the main reason for trying this experiment.