Always Arguments

There will always be arguments. And they will always be needed for what they do: they show that if you accept some set of propositions you must accept those other propositions as well. But arguments are not all of philosophy and they never were. Linearity is not all nor was it ever enough. I have been more concerned with the non-linearity that is always present as a precondition of linear argument, and the way hypertext might make that evident, than I have been with some imagined new way of writing that would escape linearity entirely.

It doesn't seem to me to be useful or possible to propose as a goal a total nonlinearity. But if there is always some linearity, then we can think about how in a particular philosophical text the linear and the non-linear co-penetrate each other, work together and against one another, and so on. And hypertext might put more pressure on us to think about and in these ways.