Happy 3rd birthday!
Believe it or not, our blog is now three years old. That's right, the official welcome post was made on May 31, 2004.
What an excellent three years it has been. Thanks very much to all of our contributors -- all 48 of you! -- and to the countless others who have either commented on our posts or just stopped by for a visit. Thanks are also due to John Fischer and the UC Riverside philosophy department for financial assistance and administrative and moral support. I'm not sure that blogging has been around long enough for there to be any criteria for what counts as a "successful" blog, but any plausible criteria will certainly have to count the Garden as a success.
Some numbers for those who are interested in such things:
Total number of posts: 328
Total number of comments: 3242
Total number of visits to the Garden: 299,938
Average visits per day: 273
I'm toasting the Garden as I type (please, don't make me drink alone!).
Kudos are certainly also due to Neal and Gustavo for their fabulous work in both the intellectual life as well as the day-to-day 'tending' of the Garden. Thanks, gents.
Posted by: KT | May 31, 2007 at 01:45 PM
This blog stands apart as one that attracts tremendous scholarly attention generally and enriches my thinking on free will and agency specifically. Neal and Gustavo (congratulations again on your award!) and John (as sponsor and contributor) are to be heartily thanked for not just making a certain cadre of scholars more focused and reflective, but for very positively contributing to the civility of critical discourse on the net. My glass of California chardonnay tips to sll of you as well!
Posted by: Alan | May 31, 2007 at 06:53 PM
Thanks to everyone who makes this a great place to escape real work without feeling like you're being a bum. The fact that the free will papers at OPC were the most actively discussed, I suspect, is in part because the Garden has primed people to blog about philosophy.
Posted by: Eddy Nahmias | June 01, 2007 at 06:15 AM
Happy Birthday to the glorious garden, long may it flourish...
Posted by: David Hunter | June 01, 2007 at 02:23 PM
An anecdote, as a way of saying "thank you". As you know we had a war here some months ago. This was the sort of excitement I could do without - 5 weeks of continuous sirens and uncertainty, some "bad missile days" (to coin a phrase) where dozens of missiles were shot at Haifa, and people were killed in the city. Still, after a couple of days I settled into some sort of routine and went every day to the office. "Garden" friends wrote to ask how my family and I were doing; and the daily reading of our always pleasant and interesting Garden, in the midst of all this barbarism, was not only a distraction but a real comfort. I am sure that for other philosophers and students who live away from the free will centers, the Garden is a significant part of their lives. So many thanks for the praiseworthy (no argument!) who initiated and run this.
Posted by: Saul Smilansky | June 02, 2007 at 10:23 AM
Congratulations to all of us! (And thanks for the congrats!)
Saul: it's particularly rewarding to read your words. It means a lot to us to know that the Garden can provide a little solace in these hard times.
Posted by: Gustavo Llarull | June 03, 2007 at 10:34 AM
Congratulations!
Here is a bit of a spoiler. I've always wondered about the practice of listing people as contributors who have in fact never contributed a post or comment. To my knowledge, of the 48 listed contributors only a handful have contributed a post in the last three years. Certain Doubts does the same thing but the practice seems suspect.
Posted by: Marc | June 07, 2007 at 09:52 AM
Marc,
The word 'contributor' in this context has a semi-technical meaning. Some is a contributor just in case they are *able* to contribute posts to the blog. All 48 listed contributors have this ability, and hence are genuine contributors.
As for those who have never posted at all, I liken them to people in attendance at a colloquia but who don't ask a question. It's not that those people don't contribute anything to the discussion -- indeed, there are probably all sorts of important counterfactuals true of them, e.g., if the discussion had gotten off track, they would have said something to bring it back on track, or if someone had not asked that question before they did, they would have asked it. One need not say something in every colloquium (or perhaps in any colloquium) in order to play a useful role in colloquia. Similarly for our non-contributing contributors.
Posted by: Neal | June 07, 2007 at 10:17 AM