Ten Years of Philosophical Disquisitions

Once upon a time, I used to mark yearly anniversaries on this blog. I stopped doing that a few years ago but since today is the 10th anniversary of this blog I though I should mark the occasion. For better or worse, this blog has been a major part of my life for the last 10 years. I have published over 1100 posts on it. (This was the first one). The blog itself has received just over 4 million pageviews. At the moment it is averaging about 70,000 pageviews per month. Given the way the internet works, I'm guessing about 90% of those pageviews are robots, but in light of my own stated philosophical views, I guess I shouldn't be too concerned about that!

As I have said before, I don't do any of this in the hope of getting readers. I do it mainly as an outlet for my own curiosity and understanding. That may well sound selfish, but I believe that if I didn't focus on the intrinsically fascinating nature of what I was reading and writing I wouldn't have sustained this for 10 years. Fame and fashion are, after all, fickle things.

That said, I do appreciate the fact that so many people seem to have derived some value from the things I have written on here. It amazes me that even one person has read it, never mind hundreds of thousands.

Anyway, in light of the occasion, here are the ten most popular posts from the past ten years:

• The Principles of Distributive Justice (2010)

• Philosophy of Mind (Series) (2011)

• Consequentialist Theories of Punishment (2012)

• The Lucretian Symmetry Argument (2013)

• Bostrom on Superintelligence (Series) (2014)

• Intoxicated Consent to Sexual Relations: A Map of Moral Claims (2015)

• Technological Unemployment and the Search for Meaning (2016)

• The Right to Attention in an Age of Distraction (2017)

• Mill's Argument on Free Speech: A Guide (2018)

• A Moral Duty to Share Our Data? AI and the Data Free Rider Problem (2019)

The most popular post is the one on intoxicated consent to sexual relations. I guess that says something about what gets popular on the internet. One thing that I find interesting about this list is that the philosophy of religion doesn't feature much on it. This is despite the fact that the majority of the articles I wrote in the first few years were largely focused on that topic.

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