Welcome to THINK Forum: a Normal approach to philosophical dialogue!

So the title is kind of lame. Understandable. Normal, get it? Ha. Ha. So, if anyone has any brilliant creative strokes of genius, title-wise, let me know in the comments.

Anyway, the blog is meant to serve as a central database for the problems, dilemmas, and discourses we currently participate in, in many disparate forums of communication. Instead of having to explain the same problem or question to five different people in IM windows, you can write it here and direct people to the comments area for discussion/further exposition.

This is not meant to serve as a substitute for face-to-face communication -- rather, it's a supplement, especially for those I see already making lengthy posts on their own blogs, journals, and facebooks, and those I've talked with in AIM, etc. It's never clear that these posts will be read by those we want to read them -- namely, philosophy students who might actually be interested and motivated enough to read these posts and provide helpful feedback and discussion. Plus, once it's posted, it's there, so if someone is too busy to listen to you now, they can read your ideas later, instead of dropping the subject.

I'm sending out invites to become "authors" on the blog -- this gives you posting rights. Unfortunately, there's no way to enable anonymous posting, but signing up is a small hump, as you can create a blogger account through any Google account you have. So if you have Gmail, you're set already. If you want rights and I haven't sent you one, e-mail me at causallyirrelevant at gmail dot com (spelled out to avoid spam bots) and let me know who you are.

I'm not inviting any teachers, simply cause I think it'd be awkie (to borrow from Andrew). I think we should have the opportunity to develop and mature with other students, and not feel afraid to make mistakes -- a fear that often makes students tentative about expressing their opinions and ideas aloud during classes, etc. Then we can argue against them all better, heh.

As with any blogger blog, you can opt to subscribe by RSS to THINK, which gives you a feed (in firefox, you can use live bookmarks, which gives titles of all recent posts when you mouseover the site -- or there are numerous RSS readers out there). I recommend it as an easy way to see new posts. It's a good timesaver.

When you go to post, there's a title box, a body text area, and a box for "labels for this post". It's a tag box. I tagged this post "metablogging, philosophy, Michelle" (without quotes). Say you're doing a post on metaethics - specifically, the Open Question Argument. You could tag it "metaethics, Moore, nonnaturalism, OQA", etc. Whatever you think would be helpful in classifying the post. Then if you do a series of posts on the same topic, and tag them the same way, people can helpfully access them by clicking your tag. Or... well, there's a million uses for tags. If I tag my name to every post, then people can just check out my posts. And so on. Go wild.

Feel free to use the place as your philosophical soapbox, talk about methodology, whatever -- but let's not bring personal attacks on other students, faculty, departments, or universities here. Keep that to your personal pages and such.

Whew. I think maybe that's it. Here goes nothing. :)