Any Requests?

I apologise for the lack of substantial posts right now... life is busy, and I haven't quite recovered my mental faculties. I doubt the usual flow of the Game will resume in earnest before Gregorian New Year - there will only be two posting weeks before I break up for the Winter Festival.

I anticipate finishing watching Firefly very soon, however, so I can then run my "Religion in Science Fiction" serial, which I expect will be more interesting than it sounds! Beyond that, I have no serial plans right now. None of the books on my reading list are monster tomes that would require a full serial to address, so I'm not sure what might be covered in a future serial right now. Those of you who read enough of my nonsense to form a cogent opinion: is there anything you would like to see covered in a future serial?

The subject matter for such suggestions would need to be in or around one of the following categories:

• Philosophy of Language
• Philosophy of Science
  
• Philosophy of Mind (haven't touched this one yet)
  
• Metaphysics
• Ethics
• Political Philosophy
• Religion (any individual religion,  comparative religion, or syncretic religion)
• Experimental Theology
• Science Fiction

Those are the areas I'm most interested in rambling about here. I'm certainly not guaranteeing to address any requests, but if there's something you know I have domain knowledge about that you'd be interested in reading, by all means give me some influence! Even if I don't feel up to a serial on your suggested topic, I might be up for an individual post.

Games posts will be over on ihobo, of course, and I expect I might have to effectively serialise some of those to make them manageable, but perhaps not formally.

So... any requests?

Comments

[Michael Mouse]

I'd be really interested to see you do a campaign on empiricism and empirical methods - taking a broad view from Aristotle via Hume, Locke and Berkeley to Mill and the Vienna Circle and James (and Dewey), thence through Popper and Kuhn and to more recent theorisations of the philosophy of science, and maybe through to the debate about evidence-based medicine.

It's a huge, complex area - and certainly not without some ill-tempered debate - but having seen what you've done on previous campaigns I'm sure you could pull it off. It's also a strand of philosophy that I care a lot about but have only ever picked at here and there rather than reviewed systematically in the way you do.

Probably not one for a quick off-the-cuff single post though!

[dj i/o]

You said it yourself -- you haven't done anything on "philosophy of mind". Perhaps it is time to do that now? :)
Perhaps something tying that in with religion and metaphysics -- examining what our consciousness really is, and if it relates to having a soul and the afterlife.

-Scott

[Foster Nichols]

I too vote for philosophy of mind--I haven't been keeping up recently, but I'm just starting a term paper on the subject so perhaps I'll come out of lurkerdom to comment...

[Chris]

Michael Mouse: yes, I could cover this, but rather than focussing on just empiricism I'd be inclined to do a serial on epistemology, perhaps entitled "What is Knowledge?" I've been itching to cover Hume in more detail, and as you say I could touch on the Vienna Circle, Wittgenstein, Popper and Kuhn... lots of philosophers I love. Yes, I'd like to do this - but it will have to wait until after I've read Wittgenstein's "Philosophical Investigations".

I haven't purchased it because I don't want to rob myself of the joy of receiving it as a gift (which might happen for the Winter Festival this year) or finding it in a second hand book store. But yes, I will happily pursue this sometime in the future - thanks for the suggestion! I shall begin the research... :)

Scott/Foster: yes, this is something that has been in the back of my mind for a while, but nothing has pushed me into action yet (because nothing I've read recently has been in this space). It would probably be a discussion of Qualia, but it might take a wider remit - I'm uncertain.

I'll table this as a future serial too.

Foster (or anyone else): if you have any books to recommend on this, do let me know! I won't be attacking this before Summer 2009 I think, so there's plenty of time for recommendations. :)

Thanks for the suggestions!