A New Plan for the International Society For Philosophers

I need to reassess my original plan and formulate a new one for the International Society For Philosophers.


I wrote one essay for the ISFP quite a while ago on this blog. The director liked it so much that he put a link on his website, but I never officially submitted it. Then, I didn't do the other three that I need to do to complete their Associate certification.

My original four ideas were: The Meaning of Life, The Most Important Question in Philosophy, The Creative Ape, and Violence and Society. Here's the original article on those four ideas.
http://www.jeffreyalexandermartin.com/2017/10/concerning-international-society-for.html

I did four blog posts on the most important question in philosophy. It came out well. Here's the link to the first in the series.
http://www.jeffreyalexandermartin.com/2017/10/the-most-important-question-in.html

I didn't do the other three ideas, even though I have published something like 100 blog posts since then. The meaning of life subject is a big one, maybe it has been too big. I've hit on that subject in several of my articles, but I haven't attacked it so directly. One of the most famous works on the subject is "Meaning in Life and Why It Matters" by Susan Wolf. I don't think that book is very good. Before I really formulate my own article I think I might do an extensive critical commentary on her work. I will need to get copyright permission to do that. Then, after that, maybe that would be the time to tackle my own view on the meaning of life. Or, to write them at the same time.

The idea of the creative ape is to dive into epistemology, or the theory of knowledge and knowing. I often comment on that subject in my other articles too. But, it's another huge subject. I think I shy from writing on these so directly because I'm still working out my thoughts on them. The issue with that is that my thoughts on these subjects will never be fully worked out. These are not things that you can fully solve, so it's easy to keep putting off writing about it. That's an issue that I've been getting over more and more. My starting to get past that personal hangup has been why I've been able to write on some controversial subjects like global warming, IQ, politics, and flat earth even though I would've preferred to know more about them before I did so. At some point you have to stop waiting. Studying can be good, but at some point you have to be productive. That's been a hard thing for me to enact.

The article about violence and society I'm not particularly interested in writing now. I recently wrote an article called "On Resentment as the Path to Destruction". In there I talked about a number of mass murderers and such. That's not very fun to write about. But, I do have notes on articles about political corruption and jurisprudence. Those subjects partially overlap. The resentment article is here.
http://www.jeffreyalexandermartin.com/2019/02/on-resentment-as-path-to-destruction.html

The word count for these four essays is between 2,500 and 4,000 words each. I already have the one article done, so I only need three more. I was thinking about new subjects, or adapting some of what I've already written. I also have notes for over 100 articles that I haven't written and published yet.

I've written two articles on Harry Potter that focused on evil, and one article where I talked about him as a hero. So, I thought about writing an article like "The Presentation of Good and Evil in Harry Potter". Here are the Potter articles.
http://www.jeffreyalexandermartin.com/2019/01/why-is-slytherin-house-bad.html
http://www.jeffreyalexandermartin.com/2019/01/what-makes-voldemort-grindelwald-and.html
http://www.jeffreyalexandermartin.com/2019/02/john-galt-harry-potter-and-hero-problems.html

A few articles that might work which I have notes on but haven't written yet would be about communication and the semantic triangle, motivation in literature and when a plot ends, closure in literature and how that works psychologically, and the fallacy of the association fallacy.

I've written two things that might work great. I'm just a little hesitant about them still because I named them after myself and that still seems a bit odd to me. But hey, I thought it was as good a name as any. The first is Jeff's Razor, which is the idea that the overall peace and prosperity of a society is directly proportional to the voluntary to involuntary transaction ratio. That has some strong supporters, but it was also ignored by several people I know in economics. It's more of a moral argument anyway. There's also Jeff's Hammer, which is an epistemological concept. It's a metaphor that helps to explain why any given thing is always more complex than your current conception of it. That article was oddly popular. I was surprised and happy with that. Here are the links for those.
Jeff's Razor
http://www.jeffreyalexandermartin.com/2018/11/introducing-jeffs-razor-framework-for.html
Jeff's Hammer
http://www.jeffreyalexandermartin.com/2019/02/jeffs-hammer-conceptual-tool.html

I wrote an article on why people may be turning towards the flat earth idea that is the best discussion I've ever heard of on the subject. But, it seems that there really isn't anyone that's interested. All of the people that like flat earth don't like it because I'm not on their side. Everyone else doesn't really care about it enough to read an article on it. Here's that article.
http://www.jeffreyalexandermartin.com/2019/01/flat-earth-truth-and-conspiracies.html

I wrote an article in favor of global warming that earned me both love and hate mail. That was interesting. It's polarizing, that's for sure. I'll probably write another article on that either way. Here's that one.
http://www.jeffreyalexandermartin.com/2019/01/pro-global-warming.html

I wrote an article on suicide that has had a lot of support, quite a number of shares in psychology groups on Facebook and positive comments from a number of psychologists. That also goes with my first philosophy essay that I already have done. So, that might be worth exploring as an option. That one is here.
http://www.jeffreyalexandermartin.com/2019/01/an-interesting-note-on-suicide-from.html

I wrote an article on the political spectrum and why it doesn't work that drew some attention. The major issue is that I didn't present a solution because I didn't have one. If I could work on a better solution that might be a worthy subject. That one's here.
http://www.jeffreyalexandermartin.com/2019/01/two-problems-with-current-political.html

I've also been thinking about a new theory and practice of literary analysis, but I haven't developed it yet. There's also Theoconceptualism, which is a religion that I've been working on laying the foundations for. I have a few articles on that, but it's still just emerging. Here's one of them.
http://www.jeffreyalexandermartin.com/2018/12/the-impetus-for-theoconceptualism.html

I have a major issue with deciding things like this. It has probably been the main problem in my life. If you can't decide what you want it's hard to get anything, if you can't decide where you want to go it's hard to get anywhere. It's an emotional issue. I have a sufficient intellect. But, even if you have a high IQ you can't figure out the outcomes for basically any decision. There are people that have a disconnection between the emotional and intellectual processing centers in the brain. These people can do just fine on IQ tests. But, they can't choose whether they want a black or blue pen. There are just too many possible consequences for such a choice, so they get stuck trying to analyze them. I'm not that bad, but it's the same problem. (I have tried many self-development methods for making these decisions, with little success. I have designed several myself without much success either, although they were probably as good as the famous self-development ones. I am in the process of designing a new one now. I have some hope for it. It currently has no name.)

Alright, let's list the ideas here and see what we're dealing with.

1 - The Meaning of Life
2 - The Most Important Question in Philosophy
3 - The Creative Ape
4 - Violence and Society
5 - On Resentment as the Path to Destruction
6 - Systemic Legal Political Corruption
7 - Truth and Jurisprudence
8 - Good and Evil in Harry Potter
9 - Squaring the Semantic Triangle
10 - When Does a Story End?
11 - Epistemological Closure in Literature
12 - The Association Fallacy Fallacy
13 - Jeff's Razor
14 - Jeff's Hammer
15 - The Flat Earth Mind
16 - Pro Global Warming
17 - Why Stay Alive?
18 - A Better Political Spectrum
19 - Towards a Better Religion

Well, those are the ideas that come to mind right now. I already did number 2, I would just have to edit it, which might be quite the job. I just need three more, but which three are the best options? Decisions, decisions.

I'm shying away from 1, and 3, and 4. I don't think I would like writing 5. I think Bastiat did pretty good at 6. I still need to work out what I'm doing with 7. 8 could be good, but is it cut out for this type of thing? Maybe. It might be so long that it would work for the dissertation though. 9 could be good. 10 will probably be too short. 11 will probably be pretty short too. I might do that one as an essay to go in a coffee table book as part of an art contest. 12 is probably going to get crazy the way I'll do it. I'll just do that on the blog I think. 13 is good, I just need to come at it from a different angle. 14 is good, I think. It seems like a small deal to me, but people seemed to connect with it. 15 seems to be boring to others. 16 probably won't work because I don't really want to study it enough. 17 could be good. 18, I'm not sure if I'll come up with a good solution. Even if I do it probably won't be anything profound. 19 won't do. That's really a different project entirely. We'll see if I get to that one in this lifetime. I forgot to put literary analysis on the list, but I'll skip that for now.

That means our real options are: 8, 9, 13, 14, and 17. Alright, that's more than three, but those are the ones I'll be thinking about. 9 is the only one out of those that I haven't written articles on yet, so I think I'll do that and then decide which ones I want to adapt for the final essays that I'll submit to the ISFP. Well, that's a plan at least.

________________________________________________

You can find more of what I'm doing at http://www.JeffreyAlexanderMartin.com

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Why is Slytherin House Bad?

Fighting Local Government Corruption - Part 1 of ?

Pro-Global Warming

Donate to Jeff's Work