Sunday, June 27, 2004

The Land of Forgotten Philosophy Articles (LFPA)

One of the flaws of the journal-article system is that if a journal article doesn't catch people's interests immediately, it fades away - or, rather, molders away - lost in some library stack no one ever sees, never unearthed, rarely if ever cited. There are (unfortunately) a lot of journal articles for which this is probably best, but there are articles that get lost in the shuffle that are interesting and worth reading. Now, I have a stack of old journals, especially Dialogue and Philosophy of Science, that need to be put to some sort of use if I'm to justify keeping them, so I'm thinking about starting a series of posts on precisely this. In these posts I'll be citing, summarizing, and evaluating journal articles that I think should be more widely considered. Some of them will be very lost, some might be recognizable but rarely given much attention any more, some might be fairly well known but rarely actually read; but I'll be doing my little bit for them all. The series will be marked by the letters "LFPA" in the headline.