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 publishing. It includes formally published work as well as some work I wrote directly for the web. It includes books, journal articles, and preprints, and 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.

• This version of the list consolidates and supersedes two earlier lists (one and two).
• Suggested short URL for this page = bit.ly/suber-writings.
• For my work on open access and scholarly communication, see my separate list of writings on open access.
• For my courses and course handouts, see my separate list of courses.
• Search these writings. (Unfortunately this Google custom search engine is broken and I haven't been able to get any help from Google. If you have any ideas, please let me know.)

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Most recent first.

• Geometry and Arithmetic Are Synthetic, 2002. A defense of Kant's thesis using post-Kantian mathematics and logic.

• 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 peddling it elsewhere.

• 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.

• 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. (I apologize for the condensed prose in these articles. I had very little space in which to work.)

• The Case of the Speluncean Explorers:  Nine New Opinions, Routledge, 1998. Reprinted, with corrections, 2002.
  • Preface and Introduction. Full text and open access.
  • My contract with Routledge prevents me from making the rest of the text open access. However, I've created an open-access page of assignment ideas for teachers, errata, and other auxiliary content.

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

• 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.

• Greece on the Atlantic, 1998. 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.

• Six Exploding Knots, 1997.
  • 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.

• Metaphilosophical Topics, 1997. 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.

• Antarctic expedition. Log of my 1996 trip.

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

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

• Is Philosophy Dead? The Earlhamite, 112, 2 (Winter 1993) 12-14.
  • 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.

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

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

• 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.

• 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.

• The Paradox of Self-Amendment in American Constitutional Law, Stanford Literature Review, 7, 1-2 (Spring-Fall 1990) 53-78. Essay-length synopsis of the book, Paradox of Self-Amendment, below.
  • 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.

• The Paradox of Self-Amendment:  A Study of Logic, Law, Omnipotence, and Change, Peter Lang Publishing, 1990.
  • Full text in 28 files. See the Table of Contents.
  • The third Appendix contains Nomic, full text, 39k.
  • 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.

• The Reflexivity of Change:  The Case of Language Norms, Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 3, 2 (1989) 100-129.
  • 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.

• 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.

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

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

• Population Changes and Constitutional Amendments:  Federalism versus Democracy, University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform, 20, 2 (Winter 1987) 409-490.
  • Second thoughts.

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

• "A Bibliography of Works on Reflexivity," in Bartlett and Suber (1987), below, pp. 259-362. I'll put this online after I convert it from the ancient word processor in which it was written.

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

• 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 contributions to this volume online. See previous two items.

• 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.

• 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.

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

• 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.

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For some reason I posted the following pieces without dates. (Why? I would never do that today, and I thought I've always had this scruple. But apparently not.) As I find time to reconstruct their dates, I'll move them to the reverse chronological list above. Meantime, they're in this alphabetical list.

• Commonwealth v. Twitchell. My HTML edition of the text of the appellate court opinions, 617 N.E.2d 609 (1993). Lightly edited for non-lawyers.

• Mozert v. Hawkins City Board of Education. My HTML edition of the text of the Circuit Court opinions, 827 F.2d 1058 (1987). Lightly edited for non-lawyers.

• Stages of Argument. A description of four stages of sophistication in argument, for use by teachers and others who would benefit from a framework for the rapid diagnosis and evaluation of argument strategies.

• Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience". An electronic version of Thoreau's text that I corrected by close comparison with Walter Harding's critical edition.

• Translation Tips for the Language of First Order Logic. Rules and tips for translating from English into logical notation.

• WireWise. An occasional newsletter of tips for academic web users that I write with Liffey Thorpe.

• Women Philosophers of the 17th and 18th Centuries. Bibliographic notes for students in my course on 17th and 18th century philosophy.