This was a too long pause… I have been writing and thinking as always, but more so for ‘academic’ media lately. In the autumn of 2018 I concentrated on writing a new book, which will appear with Routledge in a few months. Presently it is in production, and you will be informed when it is available!
It’s title: Indigenous, Modern and Postcolonial Relations to Nature. Negotiating the Environment. Many of its core ideas were tried out here, and it was a surprise for me to find how a blog can help a philosopher to find the threads of an ongoing questioning and to keep to them.
Besides the book I have been writing several articles on African and Intercultural Philosophy, which also are underway. I am grateful that I found the right places/journals/publishers where my interests fit, and the philosopher-friends who supported me to invest in this work. Here the blog also was of immeasurable importance, as it helped me find and keep in touch with these friends in all corners of this earth.
After all that writing for publications, let me share with you some thoughts on the history of this blog, and how it may develop from here. In the beginning it meant many different things to me:
- I hoped to share what I called ‘involved’ philosophy. I hesitated about that word. Engaged is the more common alternative. Involved however to me expressed better that philosophy that cares about our world, the world we share with others, is enmeshed in life, in multiple ways. It cannot have ‘clean hands’, one has to dare express views even if unsure if you can provide all the right reasons for them. You may change position later, as the world you care about changes.
- I wanted to extend my work as educator in the university for a wider audience – to share, in all modesty, from what I read and learn daily, as it is my job to read and learn and think. Wanting to make some of its results available for others to inspire them in their reading and learning and thinking.
- I needed a ‘free’ space, outside what I then experienced as a stifling environment – the not very interdisciplinary or engaged academic journals for which I was supposed to write. Finding my voice in this free space then helped me re-orient and find journals and projects that embody the engagement and/or interdisciplinary approach I deem to be necessary to think about what matters.
The blog made me find philosophical friends all over the world, people with minds that were oriented on similar goals as mine, and who were so kind to work with me. In the flow of all the new possibilities for exchange, not only virtual, but also in real life, meetings, conferences, projects, the blogs came to reflect this flow. I wrote longer pieces, book reviews, and impressions of the conferences I went to. My initial aims did not change, but the blog matured, so to speak, becoming increasingly a platform to present work that matters to me, instead of the short, searching pieces of the first years.
This month this blog had its sixth anniversary, which is incredible. I hope to continue writing it for a long time, even now that it has also become a kind of archive, where interested readers find the short introductions to subjects that only a blog can provide. Even in these months that I didn’t post, the number of viewers/readers continually grows, readers who come and take a look at the pieces that are there.
A blog is and remains a relatively free space, even if it needs a clear format and purpose. It will change, in accordance with how it has changed its author and the small room in the vast world of thoughts where it lives. I will not change the format of this blog, the combination of personal and academic insights, the essay style, the references where meaningful. It will change within this format, of course, naturally. We will see where it goes, I am curious!
angelaroothaan 