Today I started a wiki about philosophy. I’ve decided to call it the Living Philosophy Wiki. This is what I wrote about it today, on its About page.

The Living Philosophy Wiki was started on July 15th, 2006. It had been a dream in the back of my mind for at least two years before starting it. I first got the impulse to start a philosophy wiki from the conjunction of two perceptions. First was the discouraging knowledge that no matter how much thought I may put into writing a post in a discussion forum, my writing would be ephemeral – and so would the online writings of others’ whose contributions I valued in my favorite forums. The second perception resulted from being introduced to philosopher Ken Wilber, a contemporary American philosopher. Wilber has attempted integral philosophy – a philosophy of everything. That means everything. He can (and should) be criticized if he does not do justice to every previous and current philosophical current and undercurrent in both the Eastern and Western worlds. That’s a tall order for just one person! After reading Wilber’s book, A Brief History of Everything, after reading some of Wilber’s critics online, and after both agreeing with the critics and sympathizing with Wilber’s project, I began to pine for group effort toward a philosophy of everything. I felt that Wilber’s goal was a worthy and necessary undertaking. And what a perfect use for a wiki!

My inspiration to start the Living Philosophy Wiki got a further boost recently from my participation in a unique, fresh and stimulating philosophy forum, called “The Ultimate Philosophy Group”. Here, I became introduced to many individuals who had no formal education in philosophy but who were acquainted with philosophers of my time and place – philosophers and other thinkers of whom I’d never heard. Alan Watts was one. Karen Armstrong was another. My philosophy education in college had stopped with existentialism, although it had been supplemented by the postmodernist theory that had formed a part of my English literature studies. When I graduated from college, I could tell you about Aristotle, Plato, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, William James, Dewey, Sartre, Heidegger, Derrida and Foucalt. I could not tell you anything about Alan Watts. One participant in the forum made a comment that she liked the group because people had their own ideas rather than dogmatically defending the ideas of one dead white man or another. She said she didn’t care what Aristotle thought, because he was dead, while she was alive. Her attitude became the final ingredient in the recipe of inspiration for this wiki. I was ready to go.

At the beginning of 2006, my dream of a philosophy wiki became easy when I chose DreamHost, a web host that offers one-click installs of several open-source web applications, including MediaWiki. I still procrastinated, wishing to make the wiki perfect before I opened it up to the world. Then I saw the approach that Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia’s founder, took when he founded the new Campaigns Wikia political wiki. He just opened it up to the world, and he let people start creating pages. I realized that I would have to do the same, at some point, if the philosophy wiki were ever to come into being. Here it is, and from now on, it will have a life of its own.

My hope for its future is that people will write their own thoughts. My hope is that they will have more to say about living philosophers than dead ones. When they write about the philosophies of others, I hope they will use their own words and write their own opinions. When they critique the opinions of others, I hope they’ll do so in a constructive way.