This web site mainly contains a book, plus a “metablog” about the same topics.
I intend the book to be the main contribution. However, I don’t expect to finish it any time soon. I have been working on it, on and off, since 2004. When a 2007 draft, written in Word, reached 300 pages, and covered roughly a third of the subject, I realized that a major re-think was required.
After putting the project aside for a couple of years, I decided that it would be better to write the book incrementally, on the web. That way readers can start long before it was finished, and I can get helpful feedback as I go along. (Please provide helpful feedback!)
This metablog aims to address some bugs in that plan:
I am (re-)writing the book mainly from the beginning, working forward toward the end. However, there are pieces in the middle that I have thought through in some depth, which I would like to make public sooner. The metablog makes it possible to publish those early.
I want the book to be as easy as possible to read, to make it accessible to the broadest possible audience. Putting serious philosophy into everyday language is hard work, and slows me down considerably. In the metablog, I write at times in the technical language of Buddhist, Continental, and analytic philosophy. That may make some blog posts impenetrable for some readers, but makes it possible to expose some ideas quickly.
Conversely, some metablog posts may be humorous or highly informal, in a way that wouldn’t seem appropriate in the book.
Some blog posts will comment on issues related to the book’s topics, but which are sufficiently peripheral that they ought not to be in the book proper.
Some blog posts will be, in effect, early drafts of sections of the book, in rough form.
I hope that comments on the blog will develop into an informal forum for discussion on the book’s topics, where that would seem out of place in the book itself.