Detailed Overview

     This is an academic-focused blog for the purpose of engaging people in academic subjects, popularizing these topics without too much technical language, and being entertaining while doing so. Its a set of monographs on various topics with the following themes:

(a) Pop philosophy

     Summarizing topics of and traditional issues in philosophy in an interesting and entertaining way.

(b) Applied philosophy

     Applying critical, systematic, evaluative methods to current issues, current events, and within other disciplines such as history, arts, and sciences. A means for academic or expert level people to convey basic concepts and principles of their discipline or field of expertise; the ideal is to provoke people to think about that discipline or subject and find out more.

(c) Out-of-the-ordinary

     Applying critical, systematic, evaluative methods in contexts specifically intending to be entertaining, quirky, off-the-wall, or controversial. Try to bend people out of a standard way of thinking by arguments for unusual positions, or by arguments for unique initiatives.

(d) Course series

     Presenting topics that would normally appear in a series of standard philosophy courses, each article tied in with others in its series.

     Each monograph is designed to have the following general characteristics:

(1) Be succinct enough to be read in one sitting (average of 2500 words).

(2) Be non-technical enough so that they can be read without special knowledge.

(3) Be self-contained as much as possible so that issues are explained without the necessity of many outside references.

(4) Provide some suggestions for where and how a reader can delve into a subject further to find out more about it.

(5) Be entertaining in a way that grabs and draws a reader into a subject as quickly as possible.

Contributors:

     For contributors of material to this site, the idea is to get specialists to take what they do and what they know and boil it down, condense, and simplify it so as to make it fit a “pop” informational format. There will be three types of contributors featured on the site:

(i) Academic types of the MA, MS, or PhD level summarizing their specialties;

(ii) Similar level experts in specific fields on their specialties;

(iii) Teachers/professional educators communicating on some subject.

     As a general rule, we do not publish the names and other specific information, like addresses or institutional affiliations, of contributors with their articles. The same is true for any reader’s with their questions and comments. The thinking behind this is the same as with the idea of academic tenure: People need to be able to say what they need to say without retaliation from those who disagree with them.

     And there will be material posted here, sooner or later, that you will disagree with. Now, contributors to this site will not be writing things for the express purpose of being offensive to some individual person. There will be no attacks on some specific person and there will be no manifestos, mere lists of beliefs. But that doesn’t mean that contributors will not try once in a while to say something provocative or controversial in order to spark people to think about things in a different way or question and review some strongly held beliefs. There will different views expressed and positions advanced, but there will always be reasons given for those views, and many times reasons against them.