Informal academy

The internet has done away with scholarly hierarchies and released the masses, says Martin Cohen

It was said so often that maybe we began to think it was just hype. The internet did not make the book obsolete and newspapers continued to be read at breakfast instead of surfing on a laptop with a snazzy modem.

Yet, subtly perhaps, the world has changed, and with it the nature of information, its collection and its dissemination. Verily, the nature of research itself has changed. At least from my narrow perspective of compiling a philosophical dictionary it has.

Categorising their subject through dictionaries and encyclopaedias has always exerted a strange spell on philosophers. Contemporary philosophers regularly come forth with new works, each seeking to be at least as authoritative and scholarly as Aristotle. But then philosophers claim a special place in the shared enterprise of knowledge. They see their subject as not only the keystone of the arch, but (metaphors notwithstanding) the foundations as well.

Traditionally, philosophy dictionaries were produced in two stages. In the first, the editor chats with a few chums in the senior common room or (if ambitious) over coffee at a conference. From such contacts arise an "editorial board" that produces a list of "experts" in various areas.

Such an approach has its place, of course, but it has a more than slight tendency towards entrenching the conventional view, of reinforcing the status quo. The practicalities imply an editor who has both contacts within the subject and "prestige" - in short, an establishment figure.

Their "experts" will be professors at high-status institutions, seen as more reliable than lecturers at run-of-the-mill colleges. No research students, let alone the amateur philosophers who created the subject after all, will be included.

Since such learned scholars rarely produce articles on anything without many years of thought, eventually the dictionary editor must abandon the early plans and visit the library and look at one that has been done already. Since looking at one that has been done already is, by its very nature, a backward-looking exercise, the opportunity for the dissemination and discussion of new ideas is lost.

Hence, the recent philosophy dictionaries cover the work of obscure male Oxford and Harvard professors rather better than they do women in philosophy over the millennia, let alone the myriad world perspectives.

These have just disappeared, not so much by malice but - worse - by method.

Yet with the internet, local hierarchies and geographical borders disappear. The phenomena of e-mail, web lists and bulletin boards mean it is possible not only to reach colleagues very cheaply and quickly, but to reach far beyond them. Now you are able to write simultaneously to hundreds of conventional and unconventional philosophers and allow them to decide if they are interested in making a case for their approach to a topic.

So in my inbox, from professors and amateurs alike, I have articles on Confucian philosophers from China, on Vedanta from India, on African philosophers from, er, America (well, we must not fall victim to reverse discrimination).

At this point you could still filter such inquires by ranking people by post or title - or even by e-mail domain - but it would seem perverse to do so. Why not consider what they are willing to contribute on its own merits? And the implications of that shift are profound. Particularly if you allow this great unknown audience to influence the original plan.

The natural dominance of published over unpublished research is evaporating, counting web-publishing for the moment as the latter. In the past, no one would seek out - or, indeed, could seek out - individuals who were interested in some topic but had not published anything outside an obscure journal. But the web is full of such scholarly work, perhaps there because the authors were thwarted from communicating it previously.

Such articles are quickly found by other researchers and feed back into the debate. There may be no one there to assess the merit of the piece before it goes up on the web, but authors are often their own best judges.

The result is that a great flourishing of different opinions has taken place, even as conventional academia clings to its few traditional sources.

Martin Cohen is editing a dictionary of philosophy and ethics to be published by Hodder Educational in the autumn.