The Foreward from the Book Mentioned in the Last Post

While certainly subject to revision, this Forward isn't as bad as it could have been for a one-time draft written an hour after midnight.

Forward

C.S. Lewis once said, "You can't get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me." But now that I've somewhat easily edited an 800-page tome, I wonder, if he were still alive, how challenging it would be to make a book that really was too long for him. Walter Hooper reports that Lewis was reading Dickens' Bleak House at the time he said the above quotation. A long book, sure, but not the longest in existence.

But I'm not here to talk about the lengths of books, even though this certainly is a long one. I have chosen to compile the following articles for several reasons. Certainly, I wanted to make them more fun and convenient to read and study. But I think there is an even better reason. Now that I think about it, it occurs to me that there are several important philosophical implications that come from the fact that almost anyone could have edited these articles, yet they are not (if they are at all) disputed. In other words, people seem to be agreeing on something. And I think that's important.

Because almost anyone can edit Wikipedia, some believe that Wikipedia is not a credible source. When I ask my students whether or not Wikipedia is a reliable source, I get stories about how someone edited Michael Jackson's photograph so that he looked like a while, or how people add or delete certain information to suit their humorous or perhaps even unethical purposes. As long as mortals reign on the earth, it seems that there will always be kinds of people who will do strange or bizarre things for a joke or for a piece of silver.

But aside from these stories, it sis important to note that the pages from these articles often remain the same. Once in a while, we see that the information on a page is disputed. But much more often, people tend to agree with the information on a page. People go to Wikipedia as a source because it is what the masses tend to agree on.

In other words, possible for people to agree about things, and the fact that Wikipedia isn't complete and constant chaos is evidence that human beings really can get along and understand one another. In one sense, it is a reliable source of evidence that human beings really can eventually get along and agree. We may of course disagree with one another at first. But when we talk back and forth, when we define and redefine for a long enough period of time, when we genuinely listen to people who have a different viewpoint than we do, we will eventually figure one another out. We will eventually come to a point on which we both agree. We will eventually understand one another. This is what we cannot help running into when we study philosophy.

This is dialectic.