Logic Museum ban lowered

Somewhat to my surprise, the ban on Logic Museum Wikipedia links has been removed. However, plenty of absurdity still remains. It now has a special page to itself here. This means that a special team of Wikipedians, none of whom has any expertise in medieval Latin, to my knowledge, has been assigned to monitor any links to the museum added by a 'non trusted' person, and delete them. So anyone who added a link to this question by Duns Scotus, "Whether a material substance is individual through its actual existence" is in danger of being banned.

The oddity is that this kind of censorship doesn't bother Wikipedians, even though they are extremely bothered by other kinds of censorship. Thus this article on the pornographer Luke Ford has a number of links to porn sites, and this user managed to upload more than 25,000 pictures of porn stars onto Wikipedia's image repository.

What's so dangerous about medieval Latin, that Wikipedia readers are not allowed to see it?

Philosophy and occult philosophy according to Wikipedia

There's a bizarre discussion going on here on Wikipedia about what counts as philosophy. Someone removed the 'Philosophy' category from articles, for example from Anarky (comic book character) and The Illuminatus! Trilogy (not sure what that is), and from John Dee (renaissance magician or 'occult philosopher').

It really irritates philosophers when their subject gets confused with things that are entirely different from, indeed contrary to the strict and proper definition of the term. 'Metaphysics' does not mean sitting cross-legged and chanting 'om', yet Wikipedia classifies writers like Rhonda Byrne as 'metaphysical writers'. It irritates them in exactly the way that Patrick Moore used to get irritated when people would confuse astrology with astronomy.

 And while words change their meaning over time, that does not mean a comprehensive and reliable reference work should classify items according to their original meaning. As I pointed out here, the word 'astronomy' (astronomia) used to mean what the word 'astrology' now means, i.e. the superstitious and occult art. There were also proper astronomers, but they were called 'astrologers'. That does not mean that a comprehensive and reliable reference work would list medieval occultists under 'medieval astronomers', nor medieval scientific astronomers under 'medieval astrologers'. But then Wikipedia is not a comprehensive and reliable reference work, as I have argued here so many times.

How Objectivism informed Wikipedia

I have been reading Jeff Howes' Crowdsourcing and Andrew Lih's The Wikipedia Revolution. More on Lih's book at some point, but I was gripped immediately by this curious passage (p.36):

The three of them [i.e. Jimmy Wales, Larry Sanger, Tim Shell] were attracted to Objectivism for a reason.  The Objectivist stance is that there is a reality of objects and facts independent of the individual mind.  By extension, a body of knowledge could be assembled that was considered representative of this single reality. Put simply, objectivity relates to what is true, rather than ruling whether something is true or false. And their encyclopedia could detail what is true in the world without judgments. Sanger would put it this way: "Neutrality, we agreed, required that articles should not represent any one point of view on controversial subjects, but instead fairly represent all sides".

Considered as a whole, this makes very little sense.  Many philosophical systems, and many non-philosophical ones, such as basic common sense, consider that there is a reality of objects and facts independent of the individual mind.  It's not that Objectivism has a monopoly on this idea. It follows (given a few other assumptions, such as reliable sense perception) that a body of knowledge could be established or documented which was representative of external reality.  More common sense.

And then he writes "Put simply, objectivity relates to what is true, rather than ruling whether something is true or false."  This is at best incoherent, and at worst a non sequitur.  What is meant by 'relates to what is true'?  Does it mean that the assembled body of knowledge is true?  Well of course it must be, otherwise it wouldn't be true (first year philosophy students learn that 'knows that p' implies 'p').  And why 'without judgments'?  Isn't judgment required to assemble a 'body of knowlege'?  Finally, there is the statement quoted from Sanger, which I discussed earlier here, about not representing any one point of view.  Larry Sanger is a competent philosopher, and I'm sure that whatever he said to Lih when he was interviewed got pretty garbled and mixed up by the time it reached the printing presses.

Crowdsourcing philosophy

I am starting work on the Wikipedia book.  One of the central themes will be the ideology of crowds: are they mad, or are they wise?  Probably a little bit of both.  Wikipedia is good at handling matters of detail. But as I have said before, if Wikipedia tried to write the decline and fall of the Roman empire, which requires assembling the right 'little facts' in the right order, and placing a narrative around these, the result would be very bad.  I periodically return to the philosophy article itself, looking for evidence of progress.  Here it is at the end of Wikipedia's first year of existence.

The definition of philosophy is a philosophical question in its own right. But for purposes of introducing the concept, we can say that, approximately, it is the study of the meaning and justification of beliefs about the most general, or universal, aspects of things--a study which is carried out not by experimentation or careful observation, but instead typically by formulating problems carefully, offering solutions to them, giving arguments for the solutions, and engaging in dialectic about all of the above. Philosophy studies such concepts as existence, goodness, knowledge, and beauty. It asks questions such as "What is goodness, in general?" and "Is knowledge even possible?" Some famous philosophers include Plato, Aristotle, Rene Descartes, John Locke, and Immanuel Kant.

The article lacks any of the formatting that Wikipedia developed later, and there are no pictures, and it is short. But the definition is as good as you are likely to get for such an abstruse and difficult subject. As it points out " the question "What is philosophy?" is itself, famously, a vexing philosophical question.  That was probably the high point of the article, more than ten years ago.  It has had some spectacular low points, in particular here, when two rather deranged editors took control of the article ("As a consequence of the collapse of colonialism and imperialism in the twentieth century, philosophy now is classified according to three major geographical regions, Western philosophy, Eastern philosophy, and African philosophy").  The worst degradation is prevented largely because of two academically trained editors who try to take care of it. However it seems to be reaching a low point again.  Someone has arranged the article around geographical headings, which makes no sense.  As one of the better editors remarks on the talk page.

I notice some editor(s) have hamhandedly integrated the history sections with the previous "Geographical" sections of the article. Since the geographical sections were very poorly written (i.e., terribly sourced, tendentiously written, riddled with dubious claims, huge WP:UNDUE problems), this has the net effect of seriously degrading the quality of a half-decent section of the article. Can we revert to the prior organization, or substantially rewrite the entire section to repair these huge problems? To put it simply: if you open almost any reference book on philosophy, or encyclopedia article on philosophy, you will see in the corresponding "history" section a far, far better treatment than the eyesore this article is currently burdened with. And such treatments will be substantially closer to the previous "history of western philosophy" section than the current revision. 271828182 (talk) 00:13, 16 September 2011 (UTC)

Take a look at a previous version, ... compare it with the current version, which is barely coherent. Or, as I suggested, compare it to virtually any "history" section of a competent encyclopedia article or reference source on philosophy. The "non-western" sections have always been rubbish, and this just embeds the rubbish front and center. 271828182 (talk) 22:29, 16 September 2011 (UTC) 

Quite.  It makes little sense to organise philosophy geographically.  It is a single subject with a single tradition that begins with the Greeks, passes to the Romans, and to the Western medieval philosophers by way of North Africa, Persia, Moorish Spain and many other places.  The geography and history are interesting, but incidental to the subject matter. As Larry Sanger (who wrote the 2001 version referenced above) wrote in 2004

One has only to compare the excellent Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy or The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy to Wikipedia's Philosophy section. From the point of view of a specialist, let's just say that Wikipedia needs a lot of work. (Wikipedia Must Jettison Its Anti-Elitism by Larry Sanger  Kuro5hin, Fri Dec 31, 2004)

How the left conquered Wikipedia

Here. Correct in all the main points (except for its faint suggestion that we might even begin to take Conservapedia seriously).

When I worked on Wikipedia, I was continually irritated by the politically correct view that, when it comes to philosophy, all cultures and all traditions had to be treated absolutely equally. So that, for instance, ‘Eastern philosophy’ had to receive equal coverage. There were two problems with this. First, the average Wikipedia editor knows even less about Eastern philosophy than about ‘Western’ philosophy (which is not very much). Second, there is no way that these subjects can be given the same sort of treatment. Eastern philosophy is so absolutely different to the Western variety that they are effectively different subjects, which happen to have the same name.

Philosophy in Wikipedia

There is an entertaining plug for philosophy in the Wikipedia signpost today. Sadly, it entirely conceals the ‘problems of philosophy’ in Wikipedia which I discussed last year in this post. As I noted then, there are serious problems with the ‘most important philosophy articles’ in Wikipedia.  Nine of these articles are of ‘C’ class. The article on Metaphysics is a mess, containing gems like “Nihilism represents and [sic] extremely negative view of being”. The article ‘History of Philosophy’, which is not even ‘C’ class, is just plain weird (“an historical perspective … emphasizes the existence of a long period of transition between the teologically [sic] driven centuries (running up the XIII or XIV Centuries) and the rationalists-empiricists debates”; “early and late Renaissance philosophers were a more heterogeneous population, including rhetors, magicians and astrologues, early empirical scientist, poets, philologists”).

The Signpost article mentions none of this. It begins by advertising the 44 featured articles in philosophy. Featured articles are those deemed good enough to be mentioned on Wikipedia’s main page. These 44 articles may be good, but most of them are nothing to do with philosophy, including Archimedes (not a philosopher), Emma Goldman (activist), History of evolutionary thought (science), Rabindranath Tagore (poet and mystic), The_Illuminatus! Trilogy (science fiction), Learned Hand (judge), Transhumanism (movement), and then continues with a sort of interview.

The two 'philosophy editors' interviewed are not actually philosophers in the proper sense.  One of them is a mathematician, the other a student of the Frankfurt School of critical theory (i.e. a sociologist).  

What is it about Wikipedia that makes dealing with philosophy so difficult?

Derrida and Wikipedia

Someone has left on interesting note on Jimmy Wales Wikipedia talk page, about the article on the infamous French philosopher Jacques Derrida. I won’t copy the note as it is quite long and you can read it yourself if you follow the link. But I will summarise it here, as it captures well one of the fundamental problems of Wikipedia.

1. This is a very important article about one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century.
2. It would be a great thing if Wikipedia had produced a good article on him.
3. It hasn’t. The article is really really awful.
4. Worse than that, if any competent person has actually improved it in the past, the article soon degrades (the commenter gives the current version and a the version from one year ago to prove this).
5. Perhaps there is something fundamental in the very structure of Wikipedia itself that prevents it from reaching even basic levels of competence about topics such as this?

Having looked at both versions of the article, I tend to agree with him or her. I am not an expert on French philosophy. But the problem with the current article is not a matter of philosophical expertise, but of communicating some difficult ideas on a broad subject in a small amount of space, to a reader who has no expertise in or knowledge of the subject.

The current version shows all the typical weaknesses of crowdsourcing. First, crowdsourcers are typically shy of deleting material, so articles tend to grow to the point of being unreadable. Second, they have no sense of where material ought to go. So the article tends to lose any basic thread it once had. Third, they have no sense of which facts to include, and which to leave out. What facts about Aristotle would you include in a three page article? They don’t know this, so the article tends to move awkwardly from wide, sweeping, often 1066-ish statements about the world and the universe, to what football team the subject supported, or what he had for breakfast in March 1969.

Willliam Connolley on Existence

I have always used the article ‘Existence’ as a bellwether of progress in Wikipedia. For years I have watched as the article is improved, then degrades, then improves again. The problem is that ‘existence’ is (as Aristotle appreciated) about the most general subject you can get. Wikipedia is awfully bad at general subjects, which do not involve amassing hundreds of little easily verifiable facts, but rather assessing many facts for notability, choosing the notable ones, then presenting them in an organised way with a decent thread that makes for a readable and informative article, rather than a laundry list. The more general the subject, the worse the article, and so the most general subject of all, the summum genus of all genera, is likely to be the worst. And a real stinker, too.

Now William Connolley “British software engineer, writer, and blogger on climate science” has had a go. I generally appreciate Connolley’s contributions to Wikipedia. He has worked hard to reinforce rational and reasonable and ‘scientific’ approach to articles on science and junk science and pseudoscientific nonsense generally, and that is not so bad. But his attempts at improving “Existence” perfectly illustrate the problem when people who are intelligent and articulate but educated in one subject area try to tackle another subject in which they are perhaps not so competent.

I was intrigued by his edit here where he removes a brief discussion of the existential quantifier which explains how mathematicians would express ‘a four-leaf clover exists’ by defining Px as ‘x is clover’, Qx as ‘x has four leaves’ and writing ‘Ex Px & Qx’. This is essentially correct but Connolley removes it with the wonderful comment “this article is essentially entirely about philosophical goo and dribble. lets not taint it with anything like maths”. Oh dear. You learn from even the most basic acquaintance with the history of logic that existence is one of those questions that lie at its core. As I have occasionally said, e.g. here, the question of whether ‘some A is B’ is equivalent to ‘some A-B exists’ was resolved by Brentano, further developed by Peirce and Frege – who were philosophers or mathematicians or both - and that this was an important, perhaps the most important, contribution to the development of ‘mathematical logic’ in the mid-19th century. Even Wikipedia (see e.g. the articles on mathematical logic and particular on the history of quantification) is pretty clear about this.

Another irritation is Connolley’s remark about ‘goo and dribble’ – he means ‘philosophy’. ‘Existence’ is difficult not just because it has a long and complex history in philosophy, with a close affinity to other subjects like philosophy of language, Aristotelian logic and mathematical logic. Like philosophy in general, the subject is connected in the popular imagination with non-scientific subjects like mysticism, meditation, crystals and suchlike. But that is something else. Metaphysica sunt, non leguntur.

The first Wikipedia philosophy article

Joseph Reagle has managed to reconstruct one of the earliest versions of Wikipedia (dating from 2001). As he says, it is a weird mixture of philosophy, geography, the United States and a huge collection of articles on Atlas Shrugged. I have copied the original article on philosophy below, probably written by Larry Sanger. It is an interesting question whether the article is better or worse than the one that exists now. While the present article has many more lists and extensive cross-references, the original article tries to get to the heart of what philosophy really is. Sanger mentions two standard theories about this. The first is that philosophy is essentially a priori. The natural habitat of the philosopher is the armchair, rather than the laboratory, or a field trip, or a museum. I think this is correct. The second is that the scope of philosophy has got ('gotten') much narrower over time. As problems got solved, they got moved out of philosophy and into the departmental sciences, until what is left is a core of apparently intractable problems (some or all of which may be solved in time, just as the problems of physics and psychology have been 'solved'). I don't think think this is correct. And more later, as I like to say.

Consider first how to distinguish philosophy from science -- from disciplines
like physics and chemistry. Well, it?s not part of philosophy to do
experiments. Experiments play little, if any, role in the solution of
philosophical problems. Now someone might object to this, if he knows much
about the intersection of philosophy and science. He might say, "But
philosophers are often referring to and interpreting the scientific work of
physicists, who do experiments about space and time and quantum mechanics.
And they are often referring to experimental work done in psychology when they
discuss philosophy of psychology."

There?s no doubting that
philosophers sometimes interpret and refer to experimental work of various kinds
-- especially in the philosophies of the different sciences. For example,
in philosophy of physics, or philosophy of psychology. But that?s not
surprising of course: the purpose of those branches of philosophy, branches like
philosophy of physics, is to help interpret the philosophical aspects of
experimental work. But at any rate it?s not the philosophers, in their
capacities as philosophers, who do the experiments.

There is a
basic historical reason why philosophy is not experimental. Originally,
"philosophy" meant simply "the love of wisdom." The "philo-" part comes
from the Greek word philein, meaning to love, and the "-sophy" part comes from
sophia, or wisdom. Originally the scope of philosophy was all abstract
intellectual endeavor. Even up until early modern times, the people we now
call "scientists" were referred to as "natural philosophers," i.e., philosophers
who study nature. Over the years, the scope of philosophy has gotten
smaller and smaller, as different sciences have spun off and become independent
disciplines in their own right. Some relatively early "spin-offs" were
physics and chemistry; more recently, just within the past 100 years, psychology
has spun off.

So of course one might wonder how thinkers knew or
sensed that a new discipline was to be treated as independent from
philosophy. The answer is that the discipline began to be prosecuted using
rigorous methods of observation and experimentation. Philosophy in its
core sense, the sense that remains today, is essentially something that one
should be able to do from one?s armchair, surrounded, at most, by some books
that scientists write. But be careful thinking about this. I
emphatically do not mean that philosophy is totally non-observational, or
non-empirical. Certainly philosophy makes use of, in a really essential
way, observations about the world. But they are, we might say, very
general observations -- observations like "It seems to me I make free choices"
and "It seems to me that killing another person, if ever necessary, requires a
really good excuse." Observations like this take a great deal of
investigation to make; they require careful attention. But most (not all)
philosophical topics require no more specialized knowledge than the average
educated person has; except perhaps specialized knowledge about philosophy
itself.

So philosophy is not experimental and its observations are
only very general, broad observations. And that is what makes it different
from natural sciences like physics, and social sciences like psychology.
So mind you, some people confuse philosophy and psychology, but they are
different. Philosophy does study the mind (and it also studies other
things besides the mind, too), just as psychology does. But the study of
the mind involved in doing psychology involves careful, specific observation of
particular mental phenomena, and experimentation; philosophers think about more
general aspects of the mind, questions like, "What is consciousness? What
is the mind itself?"

Philosophy and popular consciousness

Larry Sanger's current battle with Joseph Reagle at Reagle's blog reminds me of odd ways in which philosophers have influenced popular culture. Aristotle is a case in point (but I will leave him for later).

First, there is Sanger's sly link to 'On bullshit' (see also here)by the philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt . Frankfurt's book is brilliant. His aim is to present, using philosophical principles how bullshit "and the related concept of humbug" are distinct from lying. He concludes that the liar is concerned to communicate something false as if it is true. The bullshitter is indifferent to the truth. It is a work of genuine, and serious philosophy, yet it has also penetrated the popular consciousness (I first became aware of Frankfurt when I noticed the book on the rack by the till at Waterstone's, the rack intended for impulse purchases).

Second, there is the influence of philosophical principles, via Sanger, on Wikipedia itself. Sanger took the neutrality policy he wrote for the now-defunct Nupedia and introduced it to Wikipedia in this significant set of edits over December 2001-January 2002. This became the famous Wikipedia policy on 'Neutral Point of View'.

The policy will strike any philosopher as the work of a philosopher. It says, for example, that rather than attempting to state what the truth about T is, one should attempts to state, fairly, the various different views about T. In representing views fairly, we must recognise that on any topic about which there are competing theories, each theory represents a different view of what the truth is, so that its adherents believe other contrary theories are not knowledge.

We could do far worse than to accept, for purposes of working on Wikipedia, that
"human knowledge" includes all different (significant, published) theories on
all different topics are parts of human knowledge. So we're committed to the
goal of representing human knowledge in that sense. This is, to be sure,
something like this is well-established sense of the word "knowledge," a sense
in which what is "known" has changed considerably over the years.

The policy also makes the distinction between presenting a popular view without asserting the popular view. "Writing unbiasedly can be conceived very well as representing disputes, characterizing them, rather than engaging in them". This idea (namely that 'S says that p' and 'it is true that p' have independent truth-conditions) is key to modern (and ancient) work in the philosophy of language. Like Frankfurt's book, Sanger's work on the core policy of Wikipedia involves ideas which are fundamental to philosophy and part of its core set of principles and methodology, but which at the same time has entered popular consciousness in a roundabout and odd way.

Andronicus of Rhodes

A remark by Boethius about Andronicus of Rhodes took me on a search for the man. As usual, Wikipedia came up. I was struck again, as so many times before, by Wikipedia's reliance on old out-of-copyright material mostly from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and by the ironic contrast between the advanced technology which led to the birth of the "Web 2.0" project, and the sort of material that ends in it - informative and interesting but essentially obsolete scholarship from more than a hundred years ago.

I have compiled a table below showing how the Wikipedia article on Andronicus was entirely plagiarised from two sources. Most of it is from William Smith's Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology, with the exception of two short passages taken verbatim from the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica article about him (in bold). The only difference is the part at the end which was omitted from Wikipedia (presumably because too dull or serious).

There is now much better scholarship available about Andronicus. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article is a good start. But the SEP project involves professional philosophers who are rewarded for their contribution by having their name against the article, and by the guarantee of protection against vandalism of the 'anyone can edit' sort. Interesting as the project is, I don't think we will ever see anything of real value from Wikipedia.

If Wikipedia is around in 100 years time, will the historical information in it still be 100 years out of date? But then which encyclopedias will it use? This was supposed to be the project that made traditional encyclopedias obsolete.

Smith	Wikipedia
ANDRONICUS of RHODES, a Peripatetic philosopher, who is reckoned as the tenth of Aristotle's successors,	Andronicus of Rhodes (fl c 60 BC) was a Greek philosopher from Rhodes who was also the eleventh scholarch of the Peripatetic school[Ammonius, In de Int 524]
was at the head of the Peripatetic school at Rome, about B C 53, and was the teacher of Boethus of Sidon, with whom Strabo studied (Strabxivpp 655,757; Ammon, in Aristot Categ P8, , a, ed Ald)	He was at the head of the Peripatetic school at Rome, about 58 BC, and was the teacher of Boethus of Sidon, with whom Strabo studied[ Strabo, xiv; Ammonius, in Aristot Categ]
We know little more of the life of Andronicus, but he is of special interest in the history of philosophy, from the statement of Plutarch (Sull, c 26), that he published a new edition of the works of Aristotle and Theophrastus, which formerly belonged to the library of Apellicon, and were brought to Rome by Sulla with the rest of Apellicon’s library in BC 84	We know little more of the life of Andronicus, but he is of special interest in the history of philosophy, from the statement of Plutarch,[ Plutarch, Sulla c 26] that he published a new edition of the works of Aristotle and Theophrastus, which formerly belonged to the library of Apellicon, and were brought to Rome by Sulla with the rest of Apellicon's library in 84 BC
Tyrannio commenced this task, but apparently did not do much towards it, (Comp Porphyry vit Plotin C24; Boethius ad Aristot de Interpret 292 ed Basil 1570) The arrangement which Andronicus made of Aristotle's writings seems to be the one which forms the basis of our present editions and we are probably indebted to him for the preservation of a large number of Aristotle's works	Tyrannion commenced this task, but apparently did not do much towards it [Comp Porphyry, Vit Plotin c 24; Boethius, ad Aristot de Interpret] The arrangement which Andronicus made of Aristotle's writings seems to be the one which forms the basis of our present editions and we are probably indebted to him for the preservation of a large number of Aristotle's works
Andronicus wrote a work upon Aristotle, the fifth book of which contained a complete list of the philosopher's writings, and he also wrote commentaries upon the Physics, Ethics, and Categories	Andronicus wrote a work upon Aristotle, the fifth book of which contained a complete list of the philosopher's writings, and he also wrote commentaries upon the Physics, Ethics, and Categories
None of these works is extant, for the paraphrase of the Nicomachean Ethics, which is ascribed to Andronicus of Rhodes, was written by someone else, and may have been the work of Andronicus Callistus of Thessalonica	None of these works is extant Two treatises are sometimes erroneously attributed to him, one On Emotions, the other a commentary on Aristotle's Ethics (really by Constantine Palaeocapa in the 16th century, or by John Callistus of Thessalonica)
, who was professor at Rome, Bologna, Florence, and Paris, in the latter half of the fifteenth century Andronicus Callistus was the author of the work Peri Pathon, which was also ascribed to Andronicus of Rhodes, The Peri Pathon was first published by Hoschel, Aug Vi del 1594, and the Paraphrase by Heinsius as an anonymous work, Lugd, Bat 1607, and afterwards by Heinsius as the work of Andronicus of Rhodes Lugd Bat 1617, with the Peri Pathon attached to it The two works were printed at Cantab 167? and Oxon 1809 (Stahr, Aristotelia, ii p129)

The 20 most important philosophy articles

This week I am fascinated by the page here which reflects my continuing fascination with Wikipedia itself, and the question of why it is generally good in certain areas (mathematics or biography for example), why equally bad in others (economics, psychology), and why it completely stinks in the area of philosophy. It is a list of all articles categorised as philosophy in Wikipedia, with an assessment of their importance and quality. On the importance of each article, I think it is roughly right. There are some articles almost entirely unrelated to philosophy, such as Council communism and (bizarrely) Andy Warhol. There is the usual political correctness of balancing 'Western' philosophy with 'Eastern' philosophy, even though these are not different species of the same genus, but something radically different.

But regarding the 'top' importance articles I think the selection has it about right. If I had to choose the 20-30 most important philosophy articles? Clearly the subject and its main branches: Philosophy, Epistemology, Ethics, Metaphysics, Logic, Political philosophy, Aesthetics. Also the 'philosophies of' mind, language, mathematics, religion, science. The periods of philosophy Ancient, Medieval, Early modern, contemporary, and an article on the history to thread them together. The 'transcendentals' such as essence, existence, identity, truth, time, and so on. The main 'tendencies' - Realism, Nominalism, Idealism, Scepticism. Major historical figures always difficult, but if forced to choose two or three from each period I would go for Aristotle and Plato; Aquinas, Scotus, Ockham; Locke, Berkeley, Hume; Kant and Hegel; Russell and Wittgenstein.

On the subject of quality, more later, although this snippet from the Aristotle article may amuse you.

Even Plato had difficulties with logic; although he had a reasonable
conception of a deducting system, he could never actually construct one and
relied instead on his dialectic. Consequently, Plato realized that a method for
obtaining conclusions would be most beneficial. He never succeeded in devising
such a method, but his best attempt was published in his book Sophist, where he
introduced his division method.

Argumentum pro homine

I just noticed something much more horrible.

Argumentum ad baculum

Argumentum ad baculum: literally 'argument to the stick' or as we say 'appeal to force'. Wikipedia gives an odd example in its article here, claiming it is not fallacious.

If you drive while drunk, you will be put in jail.
You want to avoid going to jail.
Therefore you should not drive while drunk.

Surely it is fallacious? If you want to avoid going to jail, then it probably follows that you want to avoid driving while drunk (assuming that you know the consequences of driving drunk, and that you are rational enough to not want anything that is a consequence of what you don't want). But it doesn't follow that you shouldn't drive when drunk. 'Should not' or 'ought not' expresses a moral conclusion. This does not follow from any psychological assumption such as wanting or desiring. Now, the following version of the argument is probably valid

If you drive while drunk, you will be put in jail.
You should not be put in jail
Therefore you should not drive while drunk.

But that is different, because the second premiss contains an explicit moral judgment. I say it is 'probably' valid, because it relies on the assumption that if B is a consequence of A, and if you should not do B, then you should not do A. Which could be questioned.

As for the rest of the article, it made no sense at all. Many things in Wikipedia are well done. What is it about philosophy and logic that Wikipedia finds so hard?

Francesco Patrizi

The case of Francesco Patrizi, the Venetian philosopher, is a fine illustration of the nationalistic warfare that infests Wikipedia, and the inaccuracy and distortion and bias that follows as a result*.

The problem is that Francesco has at least three different identities. His place of birth was on the island of Cherso in 1529, which lies off the coast of Dalmatia, now in modern Croatia. The state of his birth was the Venetian Republic, which dominated the area until the early 1800s. His intellectual heritage is the Western philosophical tradition: he spent seven years at Padua studying Aristotelian philosophy, in Latin. He studied Plato, and seems to have had a knowledge of the original Greek texts, even owning a collection of Greek manuscripts [1].

Consequently, there is a war on Wikipedia about Francesco's identity. Is it defined by the Western intellectual heritage with its Latin and Greek origin? All that Francesco learned in his years at Padua and afterwards are derived from it. Is it the Republic of Venice, now in modern Italy? Francesco could not have been taught without the universities in Italy whose staff and administration were not paid for by Croatians. Or is it the modern state of Croatia, where his birthplace now lies?

Wikipedia, or at least its current version, defers to the first, calling him by the Latinised name of Franciscus Patricius. Adopting the second, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article [2] uses his Italian name. But in Croatia, of course, he is known as Frane Petrić, although (I am told) they made a mistake here: they used the Croatian diacritic sign on the consonant, invented only in the middle of the 1800s.

The whole issue presents problems when you are doing real history. How do we separate the contribution of an individual from the contribution of the tradition they are writing in? No intellectual contribution made by an individual, even by an original thinker such as Aristotle, is uniquely due to their special talent, although ability is a necessary condition. An equally important influence is individual teachers, who in Francesco's case would have been Italian. So in what sense does a country - a modern country like Croatia, say - own a persons's work?

The problem becomes particularly acute in a place like Wikipedia, where the only intellectual interest - that is to say, no intellectual interest at all - lies simply in a nationalistic dispute, in this case between Italians and Croatians. The talk page shows it beautifully. "He was Italian for culture and birth" says Giovanni Giove (presumably an Italian). "It is sad to see that User:Factanista has started an further edit war to imposte [sic] his nationalistic POV" says Giovanni. "It is you who is edit-warring " replies Factanista (presumably a Croatian). "I'm going to report the behaviour of User:Factanista to an administrator" says Giovanni. "Please do, you will be reported shortly yourself" objects Factanista.

The history of the article itself [3] is instructive. Hundreds of reverts and unreverts, as the intellectual battle unfolds. An Italian editor removes the word 'Croatian' [4] with the comment "oh please, lets avoid stupid national bickering". It is immediately reverted back [5] with the reply "then stop to deny his roots and ethnicity". Which of course makes it all the more absurd. What does ethnicity have to do with the work of a man who wrote, in Latin, about the Greek philosophers Aristotle and Plato? It is different in the case of someone like Chopin who, though he studied in France and was influenced by the French tradition, wrote specifically Polish nationalistic pieces. This case, by contrast, is more like the case of Joseph Conrad, who was Polish but whose works are all in English. Or Wittgenstein, who was Austrian and who actually wrote in German, but who was taught by an Englishman** (Russell), and whose work was most influential in England where he lived and worked for most of this life. Ethnicity has very little to do with it.

What is really sad is how the article suffers as a result. In its current version (permanent link above) all but the first three paragraphs are copied verbatim from the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica article [6]. The introduction is mostly taken from the SEP article. I have commented on this irony before - that "an ultra modern high-tech medium like the Internet, when it reflects anything of importance, reflects the obselete views of 19th century scholars". None of the people who have edit-warred for at least four years over the ethnicity of this man, seem to have any interest in his thinking.

At least I found something valuable in my research today: When ethnicity did not matter in the Balkans by John Fine. About "The back-projection of twentieth-century forms of identity into the pre-modern past by patriotic and nationalist historians". Possible holiday reading.

*Many thanks to Peter Zuvela, who brought this to my attention.
** Wikipedia has Russell down as a Welsh philosopher, of course.

Ochlocracy

Ochlocracy. It means 'mob rule' or perhaps 'crowdsourcing'. I'm going to write more about this later, having recently revisited Gustave le Bon's wonderful The Crowd.

Meanwhile here is what one philosopher said about the wisdom of the crowd.

"Philosophy: I'm a philosopher; why don't I edit the article on my subject? Because it's hopeless. I've tried at various times, and each time have given up in depressed disgust. Philosophy seems to attract aggressive zealots who know a little (often a very little), who lack understanding of key concepts, terms, etc., and who attempt to take over the article (and its Talk page) with rambling, ground-shifting, often barely comprehensible rants against those who disagree with them. Life's too short. I just tell my students and anyone else I know not to read the Wikipedia article except for a laugh. It's one of those areas where the ochlocratic nature of Wikipedia really comes a cropper".

By Wikipedia editor Mel Etitis, who is a well-known philosopher in real life. He left Wikipedia shortly after this comment in 2007.