Mozart was writing music so he could pay his bills, just like Shakespeare was writing his plays, or Jack London or many others who made art in order to live. The last one mentioned was popular for paying people for giving him fresh ideas he could incorporate into stories. Is that maximum effectivenes or what?

Now let’s talk about philosophy for a second.

Descartes’ most popular work are the “Meditationes”. They are a big opus, logically coherent, a piece of art as much as some of world’s most influential philosophy. (Even if most philosphers and popular knowledge only rarely goes beyond something like Medidation 2 or 3, but that is a different subject alltogether.) There is no doubt that Descartes has used and would have used today a tool which was or is state of the art - why shouldn’t he? In his dayjob he was a bright and inventive mathematician, not some archaic pseudo-saint!

Now Aristoteles is a different subject alltogether. Actually the works we have from him aren’t his works but more or less collected writings from his students who had jotted down their Master’s thoughts and ordererd them like they thought appopriate. Is that Blogstyle or what? (Actually A. had written some books on popular science, his “exoteric” books, but they are lost alltogether.)

But why don’t we look at an modern philosopher - what about David Chalmers. He is “major league” for sure. You find his blog “Fragments of Consciousness” at fragments.consc.net.

In any case, listen up, writing folks: Use the tools that make YOU write good stuff. For some of us that may be a Moleskine (I use that for drawing), for some a Wiki or Devonthink. When is a tool “good”? When it makes YOU produce damn good texts. It’s that easy.

Rock on! :-)

shtikl