This Post is Old!
The post you are reading is
years old and may not represent my current views. I started blogging around the
time I first began to study philosophy, age 17. In my view, the point of philosophy is
to expose our beliefs to rational scrutiny so we can revise them and get better beliefs
that are more likely to be true. That's what I've been up to all these years, and this
blog has been part of that process. For my latest thoughts, please see the
front page.
Blog Year 2006 in Review
The year 2006 on this blog saw over 265,000 visits from nearly 95,000 unique users. Here are the top ten most popular posts (note: there is some margin of error here, as a configuration change part way through the year caused some posts to be accessible at two URLs, screwing up the statistics):
- May 30, 2006: More Comment Spam Reconfiguration. People must be finding this on search engines thinking it will help them eliminate spam from their own blogs (although none of the top ten searches get you here, so everyone must be searching with a different phrase). Kinda sad that that's enough to make it number one, isn't it? Sorry I couldn't be more helpful.
- October 6, 2005: Ronald Dworkin on John Roberts and Principles of Constitutional Interpretation. A brief review of an article by political philosopher Ronald Dworkin on some statements John Roberts made during his confirmation hearings, also containing a few remarks on Dworkin's book Sovereign Virtue.
- June 12, 2006: Philosophers' Carnival XXXI. You knew that one had to make the list. There was actually a quite substantial spike in the number of visits in June and July as a result of the Philosophers' Carnival being hosted here, though the increase in pages viewed, hits, and bandwidth is pretty steady throughout the year, maxing in December. The Philosophers' Carnival is, of course, always worth a look, regardless of who is hosting.
- January 9, 2006: The Holman Christian Standard Bible. My first look at the HCSB, which is now my primary Bible translation. Compares the HCSB and NKJV renderings of three verses where I think the traditional translations are flawed.
- November 4, 2005: What Is Judicial Activism? An attempt to form a descriptive, rather than merely normative, account of just what 'judicial activism' is, and why it is undesirable. I'm glad to see that this is still one of my most viewed posts, over a year after I wrote it, since I think it is one of my better ones, and it is also an important subject for voters to be thinking clearly about.
- November 21, 2005: Ivy League Elitist ... Porn? A report on the Penn Student Activities Council decision to fund Quake Magazine, a "literary erotica" magazine created and published on Penn's campus. (As far as I know, the magazine is still around and still funded - the last thing I saw about it was a poster asking for submissions at the beginning of last semester.) The inclusion of this post on this list is probably a search engine accident (see the tenth most searched term, below).
- November 28, 2005: Can the New Testament be Both Influenced by Plato and Inspired by God? A discussion of the influences of prior literature on the New Testament writers, and the significance of this to the doctrine of divine inspiration.
- December 7, 2004: An Internal Critique of the Beth Stroud Case. A discussion of what was done right and what was done wrong in the handling of the case of Beth Stroud, the youth minister at First United Methodist of Germantown in Philadelphia. This post is now over two years old. According to Ms. Stroud's own web page the situation has not changed much.
- January 7, 2006: Christianity and Aristotelian Metaphysics. This post discusses the influence of Aristotle on Christian theology (from a decidedly unsympathetic perspective). I am no longer convinced that the use of hupostasis in the Chalcedonian Declaration is from Aristotle; it seems more likely to me that it comes from Neo-Platonism. In addition to the fact that there was a significant amount of cross-pollination, as it were, between early Christianity and Neo-Platonism, some Neo-Platonists spoke of the fundamental principles of the universe (at a deeper level even than the Forms) being the "three hupostases." The three are "The One," "Mind," and "Soul," which is interesting because Mind (nous) is "that which thinks or reasons" and Word (logos, as in John 1) can mean reason (as an abstract noun), and also because in some contexts Soul (psuche) can be a synonym for Spirit (pneuma), though Paul uses them differently, and I think Plato does as well. So this post may not be entirely correct, but it is still interesting subject matter.
- April 12, 2006: The Language of Athenian Democracy in the New Testament. A discussion of the New Testament's usage of the words ekklesia and kerux in relation to the usage of those words in classical Athens.
And here are the top ten search phrases:
- cotton patch bible
- holman christian standard bible
- http //blog.kennypearce.net
- calvary chapel blog
- hcsb review
- calvary chapel blogs
- kenny pearce
- christian naturalism
- moral idealism
- ivy league porn (link omitted)
Finally, here are the top ten real referrers (as opposed to the ones spoofing the system to appear to be referrers):
- Leiter Reports
- Philosophers' Carnival
- Parableman
- Philosophy, et cetera
- GetReligion
- Better Bibles Blog
- Philosophers' Carnival #24 at Rad Geek
- SmartChristian.com
- Suzanne's Bookshelf
- Philosophers' Carnival #32 at Adventures in Ethics and Science
On the whole, not a bad year!
Posted by Kenny at January 3, 2007 4:41 PM