LogiLogi: Philosophy Beyond the Paper Wybo Wiersma Oxford Internet Institute mail@wybowiersma.net Abstract This paper sets out to show that phi- losophy has much to gain from the web, and explores what philosophy on the web might be like. We ar- gue that philosophers usage of the web will undeniably go beyond on- line journals, and the distribution of .pdf files. Historical attempts at mak- ing the web work for philosophy, and their limited success, are investigated and explained, such as the Xanadu and Discovery projects, and plain web- forums. LogiLogi, a working proto- type of a philosophical discussion plat- form, is then introduced. LogiLogi is different from forums and wikis and tries to overcome their limitations. It does so by aiming for an informal middle-road between good conversa- tions and journal-papers and by pro- viding a form of quick, informal publi- cation, peer-review, and annotation of short philosophical texts. The paper concludes with a tentative analysis of what philosophy on the web could be like, and how LogiLogi is tailored to such a conception of philosophy. 1 Introduction The growth of the web has been rather in- visible for philosophy so far, and while quite some philosophizing has been done about what the web could mean for the human con- dition, not much has yet been said about what it could mean for philosophy itself 35,56,45 . An exception is some early enthusiasm for news- groups and forums in the nineties, but that quickly died out when it became apparent that those were not suitable for in-depth philoso- phizing at all. The web as a medium how- ever is more than these two examples of early web-systems, and in the meantime it has fur- ther matured with what some call Web 2.0, or social software (sites such as MySpace, Deli- cious and Wikipedia) 55,16,77 . Time for a second look. . . LogiLogi Manta, the new version of LogiLogi, is a hypertext platform featuring a rating-system that tries to combine the virtues of good conversations and the written word 48,47 . It hopes — albeit informally and experimentally — to allow philosophers and people who are interested in philosophy to use the possibilities that the internet has in stock for them too. It was started with a very small grant from the department of Philosophy of the Univer- sity of Groningen. It is Free / Open Source Software, consists of 15.000 lines of code, has been under development for almost 3 years by between 2 and 10 people at the same time, represents 8 person-years of work (which would be $500.000 in value), and is currently live as a public beta. It is written in Ruby, and uses the Ruby on Rails framework. It is intended for all those ideas that you’re unable to turn into a full sized journal pa- per, but that you deem too interesting to leave to the winds. Its central values are open- ness and quality of content, and to combine