80:3 July 1997
Monist Interactive Issue 

Advisory Editor: Herbert Hrachovec, Vienna

Philosophy, like other intellectual disciplines, has been both constituted and constrained by the media available for the production and exchange of ideas. It is the inventions of writing and print which have made scholarly inquiry possible. And as for philosophy, some of its seemingly perennial problems in fact arose as a consequence of the fact that living (spoken) language had to be transformed into language fixed on paper. Writing created the isolated thinker, while also allowing the time to think and to organize thoughts into lapidary form; but it could not be interactive in the way that real-time conversation was, and certainly not among multiple interlocutors. Electronic networks now offer new conceptual challenges, a new framework for philosophy, perhaps even a new synthesis. This issue of The Monist is intended to serve as an experiment in new interactive methods of philosophical composition.

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See: http://philo.at/mii