h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Greetings and salutations, fellow philospher....

I'm new to writing for the guide, and I was wondering if I could pick your brains on an entry I've just written. I haven't submitted it for peer review yet, because I'm trying to collect some other opinions on it first.

It's called "How to be a Philosopher" and is a very brief introduction what philosophy is (and isn't) and some pointers on how to go about it. I'm less concerned with the actual subject matter and more interested in the process.

Anyway, it's at http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide/A609572 and I'd be grateful for you comments if you have the time to peruse it.


Best wishes


Otto.

Hello Otto,

Welcome to the Guide, it's always to good to see another free-thinker around the place.

I've read through your article and I really think it's an excellent piece of writing. It's interesting and informative without being forbiddingly 'learned', and then again it's accessible without being insultingly 'dumbed down'. Just the right balance, in fact, and precisely the kind of thing that tends to go down well on h2g2.

I particularly like the way you focus on philosophy as an active process - learning to think for oneself - rather than simply a matter of learning about what a whole raft of great philosophers 'said'. The latter probably doesn't do any harm - I must say, I envy your four / five years spent studying the subject as an academic discipline - but I agree with you that the real point of philosophy is to 'do it'.

I'm also interested in your distinction between 'philosophy' and 'dogma'. It's a notable - and exasperating - feature of human life, that the people who tend to get credited with 'having a philosophy', or suchlike, are generally the ones who are simply spouting a half-digested version of someone else's dogma.

My own experience of writing Guide entries, by the way, is that, while it's pretty easy to write a good one, it's much harder to come up with something that people are actually going to pay any particular attention to. I've written some carefully crafted, well-researched pieces that were scarcely even looked at... and then again some rather shallow articles that were (rightly) shafted for being too skimpy on the details. The stuff that goes down well, I think, tends to fit somewhere in this space between 'academic' and 'popular', sort of attempting to combine the best elements of both. I suppose that's something like the h2g2 spirit, if we can speak of such a thing.

One typo / spelling mistake that I noticed :- 'principle' (second paragraph of 'How not to be a philosopher')... it should be 'principal', of course, in that particular context.

Another point :- I suggest you turn your sub-headings into proper Guide 'Headers', to make the breaks in the text a little clearer. The editors will do it anyway, but you might as well save them the effort and teach yourself a little GuideML in the process. It's easy enough. Let me take your first sub-heading as an example...

What is philosophy?

Simple, eh?

Anyway, I certainly think you should take the article along to the Peer Review and recommend it to the community. I'll probably see you down there...

Lear

Hi Lear,

Thanks for your comments - I've sorted the spelling and spent some time wrestling with Guide ML, which I think I've got the hand of on some kind of basic level.

Following some other comments I've recieved from Clive, I've changed the "Ilustration" section from some gibberish about animal rights to a rather more mudane illustration of philosophical method. I think it's an improvement.

I'm going to think about it a bit more, and probably submit it for peer review by the end of the week.

Thanks again!

Otto.