I delivered a talk on Plato's worries about democracy. I looked into Plato's reasons, discussed the differences between Athenian democracy and our own, and asked whether we should still be afraid. (Spoiler alert: Yes!)

Reasons why Hegel is a useful dialogue partner for our present situation in philosophy.

Asking whether a designer has a home base or floats freely above history? An argument against both modern a-historical and postmodern ironic conceptions of design.

This essay studies the ways in which Hegel's thought demands "closure," critiques various proposals for an "open Hegelianism," and concludes that Hegel cannot achieve the closure he seeks, and that "open Hegelianisms" are not Hegelian...

What kind of cosmopolitan identity is possible in a world of assertive particular identities? This paper explores universalism by means of a contrast with the failed aspirations of modernist architects to create a style that...

This essay reports on issues that arise in composing a large argumentative hypertext associated with a book version of the same project. It concerns not the old navigation problem for the lost reader, but the...

The live Traversal of David Kolb's Socrates in the Labyrinth took place on Friday, October 27, 2017, at in the Electronic Literature Lab. It was performed by the author who journeyed from Eugene, Oregon to...

This essay develops from Hegel's Philosophy of Nature a different critique of the ideal of a global market society inhabited by purely rational economic actors. It extends this to critique the use of mathematical models...

A short video defending electronic media against the charge of being unusually distracting.

Two studies of architecture and gravity: We might say with Hegel that architecture the premier “external” art, because architecture constructs in physical space “out there” and uses external material such as wood and stone and...

A study of link patterns in web hypertexts, showing how traditional tree-structured single-jump links between long pages, typical of, say, Wikipedia, have eliminated the more complex multi-link path patterns found in early hypertext writing.

Plato's fear of the danger posed by the Sophists is too extreme.

This talk has two parts, the first historical and the second philosophical. I will be suggesting that the philosophical explains the historical. Many readings of Hegel's project claim that wants to show the unique necessary...

A friend once said to me that he would be glad to discuss postmodemity if only he knew what modernity meant. There are so many descriptions. We're all modern: Modern society, modern art, modern philosophy,...

A discussion of the logical role of particular concepts in Robert Pippin's reading Hegel as a theorist of modernity, with special reference to the question of whether modernity can be surpassed or left behind.

I question this idea of a pure presuppositions self-developing sequence of logical categories. This is part of a larger investigation of the inherence of Hegel's thought in historical language. Concerning the necessary self-development of thought,...

Hegel said that his Philosophy of Right "Philosophy always comes on the scene too late to [give instruction as to what the world ought to be]." (PR Preface). On the other hand, from his early...

How do Hegel's dialectical transitions among logical categories relate to ordinary empirical language changes?

A study of what the Greeks philosophers thought it took to "settle" questions and end debates.

Hegel's system aims at thought encompassing self-relation. There are many ways of interpreting just what Hegel is trying to achieve in that self-relation and what kind of closure, if any, it demands. It is also...