you could do this as a list of prompts like this: https://wttdotm.com/prompts.html interspersed with an essay.
I keep coming back to Lakatos’ generative/degenerative research programme thing as a mode of pragmatically analysing things like communities, ideologies, social movements, etc. I guess that’s significant. Karnofsky’s Beethoven - Scientific and Artistic Progress
- can you say individual papers are generative? What’s the criteria? In one sense Gettier is incredibly generative, in another it’s incredibly degenerative. I feel like the 3 fold division of ethics youre taught is incredibly in generative on any account and that’s bad pedagogy.
The canon is defined by what influenced later works. This makes it sound arbitrary or unlinked to quality. There’s an element of this, when a work is lost or inaccessible to a later culture (Aristotle’s dialogues, or the Genji not reaching mediaeval europe). But the most important quality of many works, especially philosophy, but also novels, art, etc. is whether they are generative. Canonical works (assuming not too much deliberate misreading of the past a la bloom or fading ink) did in fact generate their successors, who are themselves generative, and so on. So canonicity modulo a few assumptions is an important quality.
The canon is self-justifying in two ways. One is obvious, which is the fact that canonical works are referenced a lot, so if you care about the referencing works you might want to read the referenced ones. The other is less obvious, which is the fact that a works generativeness is a part of it’s (intrinsic) quality, and insofar as the canon is not entirely a post-hoc construction, canonical works prove their generativeness by generating their (themselves generative) successor works
- See pagerank/all you need is links HN post
- relates to the tarot and through there to The uses of randomness. Img could be tarot canon grid with the vowels as a square grid and words repeating. Or tarocash logo with scribblings and replacements ofc.