I have now been writing Philosophy Mondays on and off for 18 months with 31 posts total. The next phase of the project will be to go back over everything and make corrections based on what I have learned along the way. Much as when I was writing The World After Capital, it is the act of putting words on a page that helps advance my understanding far beyond what I can accomplish solely by reading.
Early in the series I was using AI to help polish some of the posts, but I stopped that as I didn’t find it was adding much for the reader and it was detracting a bit from my own wrestling with the material. Now, however, I am planning to go back using AI as a challenger to my thinking. I am also building a bit of tooling to help with this and the first project in that spirit is Agora, which is a network of philosophy concepts, contributors, and sources (there is a github repo for contributors).
As I am starting this new phase of the project, here are some of my key reflections:
There is lots of room to get crisper on key insights. Overall I am pleased with my approach of putting concepts first, instead of philosophers or schools.
Judgment is central and should not be automated. All attempts to do so contribute an abdication of responsibility and a loss of autonomy. Being a conscious agent making moral choices is and will always be hard.
One has to resist getting caught up in attempts to drive for certainty and to establish ultimate causes. Instead we need to embrace that we (and our knowledge) are part of the system, with everything happening in complex feedback loops with multiple levels (e.g. individuals, communities, societies).
Finally, I am finding that I am already adjusting how I make some of my own decisions in light of Philosophy Mondays. A part of this next phase I will also attempt to apply my thinking more consistently to the issues of the day. The challenge of how to live a good life has been with us for thousands of years. But it is in times of great transition, such as this current moment, that the prior answers can be revisited most productively. We have a lot of new knowledge to bring to this task. To that end I am excited to bring together a philosophy circle at The Spark of Hudson to dig into all of this in person with others.