So why the antipathy? Partly because the professionalization of philosophy, its culture—what footnotes in scholarly articles are a manifestation of—rubs me wrong. Partly, because they are an excuse and can blind us to lazy writing. (Have a response to a referee’s objection? Just shove it in a footnote.) But mainly because I hit upon a proof of the impossibility of footnotes and have adopted it as my creed in writing. The proof assumes the availability of a means of citation other than the footnote, such as Harvard-style citations. The proof involves two distinctions and proceeds by cases. The content of a footnote is either interesting or uninteresting, relevant or irrelevant. If it is interesting and relevant, it belongs in the body of the text, if it is uninteresting and irrelevant it should be cut. The remaining two cases are interesting. Suppose the content of the proposed footnote is uninteresting and relevant. Relevance makes a strong case for inclusion in the body of the text. Being uninteresting is a reason for not including it, but it depends on the reason for its being uninteresting. Perhaps there is a problem with the presentation, or perhaps this is just the kind of tedious detail that is required for the more interesting material to come. Whatever’s the case, there’s no real justification for a footnote. That’s the easy way out. Finally, and tragically, there is the interesting and irrelevant. These need to be cut. You must steel your heart and murder your darlings as Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch famously advised. Why distract the reader from what can be a difficult and complex narrative with shiny and glittering asides? It is better to stay on point. And there are other, less distracting means of including such material. The namesake of this blog, excursus, is one such.

The result is a clean, modernist, distraction-free page, one not constantly demanding that you to lower your gaze in its presence. To be clear, I have adopted the proof as a creed in professional philosophical writing. Given the bad writing habits with which we philosophers have been inculcated, it is a hard creed to live by. It forces you to make hard decisions in light of what’s important in your writing. It thus enforces a kind of literary virtue. All of this is not to say that footnotes might reasonably hold sway in other regions of discourse (for example, in legal writing), or that they may be insightful, entertaining, that they might be the means of an authorial aside delivered in a stage whisper. Footnotes can be and have been a source of literary pleasure. In “Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown” J.G. Ballard writes a single sentence in which every word is footnoted. The narrative is spun out in the contents of the footnotes. The footnotes in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest are wildly funny. Moreover play with footnotes is not confined to the postmodern novel. In a recent article in the New York Times, Alexandra Horowitz claims that an eighteenth century satirist composed an entire work of footnotes. (Found via @lucabaptista)

Horowitz is a footnote advocate. Read her case for footnotes and decide for yourself. While not blind to their literary pleasure, the footnotes in professional philosophy are a catch-all for laziness, self-deception, and self-aggrandizement (think of Kripke’s refutation of functionalism in a footnote or Stephen Neale’s three page footnote in his editorial introduction to the special issue of Mind devoted to the anniversary of Russell’s Theory of Descriptions).

Despite my opposition to her advocacy, at least within the confines of professional philosophy, Horowitz does raise an interesting and insightful point about the page-dependency of footnotes. Footnotes are footnotes partly by being located at the foot of a page. Without a page, there are no footnotes only endnotes (even if hyperlinked). Since footnotes are page-dependent in this way, the disappearance of pages on ebooks threatens the flourishing of footnotes this medium. The important point is that the page is a unit associated with a particular material medium, a dead tree book. But the contents of books are increasingly made available in media not constrained by pagination. This, I believe, is an important issue. Think about citation. If pagination isn’t marked, what form should citation take? I have yet to see a good design solution that combines the convenience of scrolling through text presented in a single continuous column with marked pagination. Oxford Scholarship Online is an example of an awkward design that combines the rigidity of fixed pagination with the fluidity of a webpage.

New technology has revealed that an important structural feature of books, the page considered as an abstract unit, is really just a contingent manifestation of its material constitution. It was easy to be blind to this in the absence of adequate alternatives (the scroll was an alternative, it just wasn’t adequate). As Nietzsche once insightfully remarked, “Our writing tools are also working on our thoughts”.

The spine and front cover have “Basic Writings” before “Martin Heidegger”, but this ordering is reversed in the two (sic!) interior title pages. The back cover refers to the book as “Basic Writings”, but that is clearly shorthand, and does not settle the matter one way or the other. Other mysteries abound. Is the subtitle “Revised and expanded edition” as it appears on the spine and front cover, or is it “from Being and Time (1927) to The Task of Thinking (1964)” as it appears in the title page. A colon mysteriously appears in the spine only to disappear, never to be seen again. Surely, punctuating titles is not under the purview of typesetters. But apparently, at Routledge, it is. This is the book production equivalent of a train wreck. I am loathe to refer to it in a bibliography, because I do not know what the book is called. How could it be that after close inspection, one is left with no idea what the title of a book is, or whether to alphabetize it under “B” or “M”.

Legislation that has not kept abreast of changing technology can make the choice difficult.

As a philosopher, I write research papers, drafts of which are distributed on the web as PDFs. Open access to evolving research is important, and I am committed to it. Since I want to give my work the best chance of being understood, I take the time to properly typeset the PDFs with XeLaTeX. There is a problem, however, with distributing PDFs over the web.

PDF files can contain font information in a way that is easily extractable from the file. While the licensing of some type foundries allow embedded fonts in PDFs, many (especially smaller type foundries) do not. Indeed the ones that did probably did so at Adobe’s urging when PDF distribution on the web was relatively small and so not that great of a risk.

I would like to support small type foundries by buying their fonts. There are some brilliant type designers out there, and they should be rewarded. Unfortunately, since the main thing I want these fonts for is for web distributed PDFs, I can’t do that without violating licensing restrictions. And that’s not support.

There are of course open source fonts. Some of them are fine pieces of work. But the choice is limited, and important design decisions should not be so constrained.

DRM is not the answer, as the recent history of music distribution online sadly reveals.

I don’t know how to resolve this problem. It is partly technological, partly, legal. But I thought I would highlight for other academics who distribute their work online.

Upon finishing this post, I came across this essay that has more information about the legal and technological obstacles with some discussion of potential solutions.

sympoze is a social bookmarking site for philosophers. Currently in beta, sympoze is only open to professional philosophers and graduate students. Not only can you submit links but sympoze has the following features:

• Voting on submitted links
• User profiles
• Online status
• Instant messaging

Looks to be an excellent online resource if enough philosophers participate—and not just because a bookmark to one of my posts made it to the front page. ;)

Update Kieran posts about it here.

A paradigm shift in academic publishing is occurring—a move from dead tree sources to online resources. As I have had occasion to comment (here and here), this is a Good Thing™. However, the old paradigm is not without its virtues, perhaps not all of which will be preserved in the new paradigm.

Searching online is not like searching by other means. For all its advantages, sometimes something can be lost. For example, I find it much harder to browse for DVDs on Amazon than it was browse for them in a DVD store. A certain potential for fortuitous serendipity has been noticeably diminished. With respect to dead tree journals, it was convenient to go to the departmental library and flip through the new journals for a good sense of what was coming out. My departmental library, however, has been canceling subscriptions as our university library is making these journals available online. Sensible, but a lost opportunity for browsing.

Now for the forehead slapping. Most journals that publish material online provide convenient RSS feeds of recent issues. (Most but not all—the venerable Journal of Philosophy doesn’t. I must write to the editor about this, and I encourage philosophers out there to do the same.) I spent twenty minutes this afternoon subscribing to feeds. Now I can browse recent issues from my newsreader in my office. Why didn’t I think of this before? The paradigm shift is still ongoing. And even I, as an editor who has actively promulgated it (by instituting a new publishing model for the Aristotelian Society with more to come) can yet remain blind to the obvious possibilities.

When I am done filling out my subscriptions, I will post a list of philosophy feeds.

Consider direct quotation—no easy phenomena. Part of the point of citation, here, is so that the reader can read the quotation in context, to decide for themselves whether the quoted author has been misrepresented. The usual case is to quote from a dead tree source—a printed book or journal. Imagine if books were quite different than from the way they actually are. Suppose that every time a book is closed the text would change, sometimes subtlely, sometimes less so. When your intrepid reader tracks down your citation, the quote may or may not be there. What would be the point? There would be very little, if any, point at all. The requisite stability would be missing from texts that spontaneously morph.

One good thing about dead tree sources is that they don’t change in this way. But now consider delivering text online. It is easy to change HTML or upload a new version of a PDF. The nature of the medium does not guarantee the stability guaranteed by ink on a page. Instead of natural law, we have the moral law. We must rely—God help us—on trust. This is manifest in bloggers’ convention of striking through changed text in a post. Leaving a trace of a misspelled word, a hasty judgment, or mal mot is a sign of good faith, and bloggers who depart from this convention are subject to (verbal) sanction in comments or in pingback posts.

As the delivery of academic journals is moving increasingly online, editors face a corresponding moral challenge. The Aristotelian Society publishes papers online before the print volume hits the stands. Once an author asked to change his article after the online version went live but before the print volume was typeset. What was the problem? Things change online all the time!—he implored. The problem was simple. It would violate a precondition for the possibility of citation.

This form allows you to retrieve Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) for journal articles, books, and chapters by simply cutting and pasting the reference list into the box below. You may use the form with any reference style, although the tool works most reliably if references are formatted in a standard style such as shown in this example:

Clow GD, McKay CP, Simmons Jr. GM, and Wharton RA, Jr. 1988. Climatological observations and predicted sublimation rates at Lake Hoare, Antarctica. Journal of Climate 1:715-728.

To test the interface, simply cut & paste this reference!

Please separate individual references by a blank line. For best results, there should be no line breaks within an individual reference. When submitting multiple references they must be in alphabetical order or presented as a numbered list. For editorial purposes, to check the accuracy of a reference click on the DOI link that is returned with the reference.