Writings

From Peter Suber
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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.



Most recent first

  • 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.
  • Knot Tying Notation, July 2002. A "programming language" to record the steps in a knot tying method.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • WireWise, April 1998 - April 1999. An occasional newsletter of tips for academic web users that I wrote with Liffey Thorpe.
  • 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". An electronic version of Thoreau's text that I corrected by close comparison with Walter Harding's critical edition, August 1997.
  • 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.
  • When We Leave Our Desks. My baccalaureate address at Earlham College, June 1992. An essay on metaphilosophy in disguise.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • "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.


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