Writings

This bibliography covers nearly all of my public or published pieces on topics other than open access. It covers my work in philosophy and law (my academic fields), as well as some more personal and playful pieces not suitable for academic publication. It includes books, journal articles, preprints, and self-published pieces. It omits course handouts and minor pieces like blog posts, listserv messages, letters to editors, presentation slides, and small web pages. I plan to keep it up to date, though I'm still trying to catch up by posting unposted pieces from years ago. — Peter Suber.

• Suggested short URL for this page = bit.ly/suber-writings.
• This version of the list (started March 2014) consolidates and supersedes two earlier lists here and here.
• For my work on open access, see my separate list of writings on open access.
• For my courses and course handouts, see my separate list of courses.
• My ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) is 0000-0002-3577-2890. Most of the works below appeared before ORCID existed. But I support ORCID and include my number here in order to help associate it with my writings.
• Search these writings. Bear with me while I make the index for this custom search engine more complete.

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Most recent first

• Review of James Allen, A Sceptical Theory of Morality and Law, Peter Lang, 1998, International Studies in Philosophy, Vol. 35, No. 4 (2003) pp. 134-135 (perma.cc link).

• Geometry and Arithmetic Are Synthetic, 2002. A defense of Kant's thesis using post-Kantian mathematics and logic.
  • Copy at Earlham.
  • Translated into Ukrainian by Nikita Shevchenko, August 2020.
  • Translated into Russian by Nikita Shevchenko, August 2020.

• Saving Machines From Themselves:  The Ethics of Deep Self-Modification. Written for Georg Trogemann (editor), Essays on Self-Modifying Media, 2002. But the book project fell through and I posted my contribution online without waiting to find another publisher. An examination of the ethics of paternalizing creatures capable of deep and precise self-modification. I expect that intelligent machines will achieve this capability, through reprogramming, sooner than human beings, through drugs and surgery. Hence the pieces focuses on the ethics of paternalizing intelligent machines capable of rewriting their own code.

• Reflections on 9/11, One Year Later, September, 2002. Thoughts on our loss of freedom, and its simultaneous acceptance and denial in the name of patriotism.

• Is Your College Ready to Tackle More than Sweatshops?  Chronicle of Higher Education, August 2, 2002, p. B16.
  • Reprinted in the National Association of Educational Buyers Journal, December 2003, pp. 8-9.

• Knot Tying Notation, July 2002. A "programming language" to record the steps in a knot tying method.

• Review of George Dyson, Darwin Among the Machines:  The Evolution of Global Intelligence (Perseus Books, 1997), the American Philosophical Association's Newletter on Philosophy and Computers (perma.cc link).
  • Also see the issue of the APA newsletter containing this review (perma.cc link).

• Articles on Amendment (I.31-32), Civil Disobedience (I.110-113), Paternalism (II.632-635), and Self-Reference in Law (II.790-792), in Christopher Berry Gray (ed.), Philosophy of Law: An Encyclopedia, Garland Pub. Co., 1999. (Apologies for the condensed prose in these articles. I had very little space in which to work.)
  • Copy of Amendment at Earlham.
  • Copy of Civil Disobedience at Earlham.
  • Copy of Peternalism at Earlham.
  • Copy of Self-Reference in Law at Earlham.
  • The article on civil disobedience is also reprinted in Civil Disobedience, Libertas Institute, 2014, pp. 63-63.

• The Case of the Speluncean Explorers:  Nine New Opinions, Routledge, 1998. Reprinted, with corrections, 2002 (perma.cc link).
  • Preface and Introduction. Full text and open access.
  • Copy of the "Preface" and "Introduction" at Earlham.
  • My contract with Routledge prevents me from making the rest of the book open access. However, I've created an open-access page of assignment ideas for teachers, errata, and other auxiliary content.
  • The Preface and Introduction were translated into Slovak by Sandra Knudsen.
  • The Preface and Introduction were translated into Hindi by Nikol.
  • The book home page was translated into Croatian by Milica Novak.
  • The full text of the book was translated into Complex Chinese and published by The Commercial Press (Hong Kong) in 2013. There is not an OA edition of the Chinese translation.

• Stages of Argument, 2000. A description of four stages of sophistication in argument, for use by teachers who evaluate arguments and must communicate their evaluations in a way that helps the authors improve.
  • Copy at Earlham.

• Glossary of First-Order Logic, 1999. Definitions of basic terms in basic set theory, basic recursive function theory, two branches of logic (truth-functional propositional logic and first-order predicate logic) and their metatheory.

• Infinite Reflections and its appendix, A Crash Course in the Mathematics of Infinite Sets, St. John's Review, XLIV, 2 (1998) 1-59.
  • Copy of Infinite Reflections at Earlham.
  • Copy of A Crash Course in the Mathematics of Infinite Sets at Earlham.

• Translation Tips for the Language of First Order Logic, 1998 (perma.cc link). Rules and tips for translating from English into logical notation.

• An English Homophone Dictionary, 1998. At one time the largest on the web, but no longer updated. Made in collaboration with A.L.P. Thorpe.
  • Copy at Earlham.

• WireWise, April 1998 - April 1999. An occasional newsletter of tips for academic web users that I wrote with Liffey Thorpe.

• Greece on the Atlantic, 1998 (perma.cc link). An idle explication of the geographic isomorphism of Greece and the Blue Hill Peninsula in Maine.

• Notes on Logic Notation on the Web, 1998. Tracking proposals and progress in getting support for logic notation into a future version of HTML, and methods for bypassing HTML.

• Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience". A digital version of Thoreau's text that I corrected by close comparison with Walter Harding's critical edition, August 1997. For use as a course hand-out. It numbers the paragraphs for easy reference.

• Six Exploding Knots, 1997 (Wayback Machine link) (perma.cc link).
  • This article has been translated into Dutch by Pieter van de Griend, "Zes Exploderende Knopen," Het Knoopeknauwertje, 9 (December 1997) 8-13.

• Legal Reasoning After Post-Modern Critiques of Reason, Legal Writing, The Journal of the Legal Writing Institute, 3 (1997) 21-50.
  • Copy at Earlham.

• Metaphilosophical Topics, 1997 (perma.cc link). A large, personal list of questions about the nature of philosophy.

• Knot So Fast, 1997. A proposal for regulating the world knot tying speed record.

• Classical Skepticism, 1996. An exposition of Pyrrhonian skepticism, based on the writings of Sextus Empiricus, with replies to common objections, and a sketch of how this form of skepticism evolved and mutated in western intellectual history. (This is a long article or short book.)
  • Copy at Earlham.
  • This has been translated into Greek under the title, οι σκεπτικοί, Thyrathen, 2003. The translation is unauthorized, but I don't mind. If CC licenses had existed when I first put it online, I'd have put it under a CC-BY license, authorizing translations.

• Antarctic expedition. Log of my 1996 trip (perma.cc link).

• Question-Begging Under a Non-Foundational Model of Argument, Argumentation, 8 (1994) 241-50.
  • Copy at Earlham.

• A Year of Teaching with Dialog, Newsletter on Teaching Philosophy, 93, 1 (Spring 1994) 123-26.
  • Copy at Earlham.

• Is Philosophy Dead? The Earlhamite, 112, 2 (Winter 1993) 12-14 (perma.cc link).
  • Reprinted at the Philosophy News Service, July 20, 1999.

• 50 Years Later, The Questions Remain, Ellsworth American, August 27, 1992, Section I, p. 2. On Kurt Gödel's trip to Blue Hill, Maine, in 1942.
  • Copy at Earlham.

• When We Leave Our Desks. My baccalaureate address at Earlham College, June 1992. An essay on metaphilosophy in disguise.
  • Copy at Earlham.

• Unsimplifying Political Correctness, The Earlhamite, 111, 2 (Spring 1992) 23-25.
  • Copy at Earlham.

• The Paradox of Liberation, 1992. Variations on the theme that one is not free until one freely chooses to become free. I find traces of the theme in Kant, Dennett, and Mill, and show their strategies for preventing the claim from becoming a contradiction.
  • Copy at Earlham.

• Self-Determination and Selfhood in Recent Legal Cases. First delivered as the 1992 Emerson Lecture at Earlham College. How U.S. courts decided a few headliner cases about self-determination and what theories of the human person they assumed.
  • Copy at Earlham.

• The Paradox of Self-Amendment in American Constitutional Law, Stanford Literature Review, 7, 1-2 (Spring-Fall 1990) 53-78. Essay-length synopsis of my book, Paradox of Self-Amendment, below.
  • Copy at Earlham.
  • This essay has been translated into Portuguese by Fernando Borges Araújo, "O Paradoxo da Auto-Revisão no Direito Constitucional," Revista da Faculdade de Direito da Universidade de Lisboa, 31 (1990) 93-128.

• Review of Jeff Mason, Philosophical Rhetoric:  The Function of Indirection in Philosophical Writing, (Routledge, 1989), in Philosophy and Rhetoric, 23, 2 (1990) 136-141.
  • Copy at Earlham.

• The Paradox of Self-Amendment:  A Study of Logic, Law, Omnipotence, and Change, Peter Lang Publishing, 1990. HTML edition, full text in 28 files.
  • Copy of the HTML edition at Earlham.
  • PDF edition in DASH. Full text in one file.
  • Also see the essay-length synopsis of the book, above (Stanford Literature Review, 1990).

• A Case Study in Ad Hominem Arguments:  Fichte's Science of Knowledge, Philosophy and Rhetoric, 23, 1 (1990) 12-42.
  • Copy at Earlham.

• The Reflexivity of Change:  The Case of Language Norms, Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 3, 2 (1989) 100-129.
  • Copy at Earlham.
  • This essay has been translated into German by Bertram Kienzle, "Die Reflexivität des Wandels:  Der Fall der Sprachnormen," in Bertram Kienzle and Helmut Pape (eds.), Dimensionen des Selbst:  Selbstbewußtsein, Reflexivität und die Bedingungen von Kommunikation, Suhrkamp Verlag, 1991, pp. 179-219.
  • Second thoughts. Copy at Earlham.

• Mind and Baud Rate, 1989. Questions, speculations, and meditations on the relation between the speed of bit-switching and the emergence of intelligence and selfhood.
  • Copy at Earlham.

• What is Software? Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 2, 2 (1988) 89-119.
  • Copy at Earlham.

• Analogy Exercises for Teaching Legal Reasoning, Journal of Law and Education, 17, 1 (Winter 1988) 91-98.
  • Copy at Earlham.

• Population Changes and Constitutional Amendments:  Federalism versus Democracy, University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform, 20, 2 (Winter 1987) 409-490 (perma.cc link).
  • Copy in DASH.
  • Copy at Earlham.
  • Second thoughts from 1999.

• Becoming Free. My baccalaureate address at Earlham College, June 1987.
  • Copy at Earlham.

• "A Bibliography of Works on Reflexivity," in Bartlett and Suber (1987), below, pp. 259-362.
  • Copy (image-scan) in DASH.

• Logical Rudeness, in Bartlett and Suber (1987), below, pp. 41-67.
  • Copy at Earlham.

• Self-Reference:  Reflections on Reflexivity, Co-edited with Steven J. Bartlett. Martinus Nijhoff, 1987. An interdisciplinary anthology of essays.
  • I only plan to put my own contributions to this volume online. See previous two items.
  • Not open access but still available from the publisher at an outrageously high price.

• The Problem of Beginning. I wrote this article in the mid-1980's and put it online in December 2001. A survey of the methods philosophers have used to justify their point of departure or avoid the need to justify it. Unfinished.
  • Copy at Earlham.

• Against the Sanctity of Life. I wrote this article in the mid-1980s and put it online in 1996. An attempt to articulate and criticize the position underlying much of the "right-to-life" movement. Some nuanced "pro-life" positions are compatible with this critique.
  • Copy at Earlham.

• The Inductive Game of Rubik's Cube, 1985. A new and harder way to play Rubik's Cube, with some strategy tips.
  • Copy at Earlham.

• "GradeSheet:  A Spreadsheet for Teachers," Sorcim/IUS Micro Software Inc., November 1984. I wrote this for CP/M machines. Let it rest in peace.

• "Nomic:  A Game That Explores the Reflexivity of Law," Scientific American, 246, 6 (June 1982) 16-28. A game with commentary embedded in column by Douglas R. Hofstadter. Reprinted, sometimes in revised versions, in many languages and many media.
  • Full text, 39k. This link is not to the version in Hofstadter's column but to the version of the game in my 1990 book, Paradox of Self-Amendment.
  • Also see my Nomic page.

• The Place of Philosophy in the Humanities: A Statistical Profile, Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, 55, 3 (February 1982) 417-23. This was a print-only publication, and so far I've only had time to rekey the abstract.
  • Copy of the abstract at Earlham.

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