09.04.08

The Preterphysics

Posted in SEO, marketing, metaphysics, philosophy, preterphysics at 2:09 pm by nogre

I’ve made some progress on my metaphysics; enough to think about writing a monograph.

Today (Sept. 2 ‘08) I tried thinking of a name for this monograph.  My thought process was to call it something with metaphysics but I couldn’t think of anything good.  First of all the word metaphysics is inherently confused, so it is hard to use well.  Its history, so I’ve been instructed, can be traced back to a librarian organizing Aristotle’s books on the shelf.  The untitled book that contained what was to become Aristotle’s Metaphysics was sitting in front of Aristotle’s Physics, so the librarian called it ‘before physics’, Metaphysics.  I know little of how words come into existence to pass judgment, but I am sure that I want to avoid all the baggage that this word has accumulated since then.

I thought about the Tractatus. ‘Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus’ is sufficiently meaningless such that it would be hard to regret calling it that later.  I mean really.  Of course it is a treatise, what philosophical text isn’t? And it’s on some logic and philosophy, ooo so descriptive.  So even if W. changed his mind about any of the content, the title would still hold up.

So I began to wonder if it is worth it to have a particularly descriptive title at all.  Then the hyphenation caught my eye.  ’Hypermetaphysical’, ‘Pseudometaphysics’ and other prefixed monstrosities ran through my thoughts but I finally came upon pretermetaphysical.  It is just too damn long.  Preterphysical is less long, is meaningless though suggestive, and preter- means nearly the exact same thing as meta-.

No baggage either. Google returned 3 results for preterphysical and 0 for preterphysics. Of the 3 that came up for preterphysical, one was a cached reference to one of the other pages and 404ed when I tried to view it and the other 2 used the word one time each and only in passing.  That sealed it.  I am writing The Preterphysics.

Now no one steal my cool name.  I claim it!!!!!!

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[For anyone who wonders why this was filed under SEO and Marketing, one of the goals of this post is to claim the name "The Preterphysics" for myself.  In less than 3 days of publishing this post I'll likely be #1 in Google for a search for "Preterphysics" and "Preterphysical". (UPDATE: I am #1 now, only 6 hours after publishing)  By having a blog and posting regularly (and no spam) Google and the other search engines regularly scan this site for new content.  Granted, these words are made up and so there aren't other people who are using them, so there is no competition for becoming #1.  However, this is irrelevant to my purposes: I am trying to claim some intellectual property space and being first counts for something.  I am still 3, 4 and 6 in Google searches for "relativity biology" because of these posts months ago.  One of the purposes for this blog is to be a record of things I have written and, since I am outside of academia, having a public record of when my work was published goes a long way in establishing a timeline of ideas (showing that the ideas were mine).  At this point it would be hard for someone to make a claim to any of my philosophy of biology since it has been public domain for a good while now (and philosophy carnivalled).  Sure I could try to get my work into a journal -all considering it would hit my target audience a bit more than this website and provide an even more secure record of my work- but journal publishing is much about being an academic (and takes forever and I'd probably not make the cut anyway).  I'm concerned with getting my ideas out there, claiming the intellectual space for myself, and making it available to anyone who is like-minded.  This post (even as silly as it is, making fun of Wittgenstein for titling his book as he did, completely deflating any meaning from my own words, and harping on hyphenation) does all of that because of the established internet machinery.]

 

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