Moving to Substack

I started this blog 18 years ago, as a second-year undergraduate philosophy major.  The first couple years were... very undergrad-y... but I think by 2006 or so I was doing some pretty interesting philosophy on here, much (but not all) of which I would still stand by.  The next few years (heading into early grad school) were probably the peak years for the blog in terms of audience engagement, commonly getting dozens of comments per post.

After the old blogosphere largely died off, and engagement moved to Facebook and Twitter, I've kept the blog going as a kind of "extended mind" for organizing my thoughts.  Sharing the posts on FB sometimes leads to some good discussion there.  And I get loads of random google hits through all the page-rank built up over the years. I've written over 2000 posts, received over 14K (non-spam) comments, and since 2010 have received over 5 million page views.  Still, the old Blogger software is no longer well-supported, so I'm curious to see if I can do better on a new platform.

I've heard good things about Substack, so have set up a new blog/newsletter there, called Good Thoughts. (The 'goodthoughts' substack url was already taken, alas, so I've gone with rychappell.substack.com instead.)  Existing email subscribers should be carried over automatically.  Others can click through or use the following form to subscribe:

Whereas Philosophy, et cetera was always primarily a self-indulgent project, my aim with Good Thoughts is to be a little more thoughtful about writing for an audience, e.g. writing more self-contained posts, with less reliance on back-linking to previous posts to fill in essential background, etc. We'll see how it goes, but I hope it proves worthwhile.

Hope to see you there!

P.S. For a synoptic view of my past blogging, check out the annual review posts under my 'compendia' category.

Utilitarianism Debate with Michael Huemer

Matthew Adelstein kindly invited me & Michael Huemer to hash out our disagreements about utilitarianism over on his YouTube channel.  The resulting discussion was fun and wide-ranging.  In this post, I just want to highlight a couple of major themes that seemed fairly central to our dispute: (1) which intuitions we place the most weight on, and (2) the inferential role of wrongness.

Writing Papers with Pandoc

At Daily Nous, there's a discussion of Tech Advice for a New Philosophy Grad Student.  There's some dispute about whether or not it's worth learning LaTeX.  I recommend pandoc instead for those who are on the fence.  You write in markdown, a simpler and more readable plain text syntax (compare *markdown italics* to \emph{LaTeX italics}, for example!). But it subsequently uses LaTeX to produce good-looking PDFs.  Or it can just as easily convert into other document formats, such as Word .docx, if needed.  It's very flexible.