How I work
I am constantly amazed at just how complete this website is, and how many articles are on it. The Kant bio has copyright dates from 1996 to 2003, so it seems clear that Kelley Ross just keeps modifying the material based on feedback from others and his own reflection. That, of course, is exactly how I would write my own philosophy papers.
I can imagine writing a single paper--perhaps even a hundred words. Then based on feedback from others, that could grow into a thousand words, then ten thousand and a hundred thousand. But, of course, one would need the necessary feedback from others, in a situation not unlike the Critters workshop.
I actually submitted a "short story" to Critters once, although it was less than a thousand words. It was simply something that I had written all at once while I was away at the beach on holidays, nothing more than a hypothetical conversation that I was having with a robot. One of the reviewers said that it was just stuff that we'd all heard before from Asimov's own robot stories. I decided to research Asimov, and quickly discovered that he was considered, over dozens of robot stories, to have pretty much covered every possible ramification of his Laws of Robotics. On the one hand, I really didn't want to try to read all those stories just to come up with one of my own that wasn't like one of his. On the other hand, I started to try to revise the story based on other people's feedback and quickly found that I simply found it annoying and boring. I had always loved revising my Masters thesis based on the comments of the supervisor and my own reflection. But the fact that this project was just so painful and uninspiring was all the evidence I needed that I really wasn't a fictional author--at least, not with my mentality then. Fiction is just not where I'm at right now, only non-fiction.
In that respect, it would be good if they had an online philosophy workshop somewhere, but from what I can see, there's just nothing. Still, if I ever submit anything to this website, I look forward to feedback from it.
I can imagine writing a single paper--perhaps even a hundred words. Then based on feedback from others, that could grow into a thousand words, then ten thousand and a hundred thousand. But, of course, one would need the necessary feedback from others, in a situation not unlike the Critters workshop.
I actually submitted a "short story" to Critters once, although it was less than a thousand words. It was simply something that I had written all at once while I was away at the beach on holidays, nothing more than a hypothetical conversation that I was having with a robot. One of the reviewers said that it was just stuff that we'd all heard before from Asimov's own robot stories. I decided to research Asimov, and quickly discovered that he was considered, over dozens of robot stories, to have pretty much covered every possible ramification of his Laws of Robotics. On the one hand, I really didn't want to try to read all those stories just to come up with one of my own that wasn't like one of his. On the other hand, I started to try to revise the story based on other people's feedback and quickly found that I simply found it annoying and boring. I had always loved revising my Masters thesis based on the comments of the supervisor and my own reflection. But the fact that this project was just so painful and uninspiring was all the evidence I needed that I really wasn't a fictional author--at least, not with my mentality then. Fiction is just not where I'm at right now, only non-fiction.
In that respect, it would be good if they had an online philosophy workshop somewhere, but from what I can see, there's just nothing. Still, if I ever submit anything to this website, I look forward to feedback from it.
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