An examination of "Philosophy Bro"

Philosophy Bro.


A haven for those seeking easy to read summaries of various academic philosophic works. But they're more than just summaries. Nothing on the site is written in "academic language". Everything is written in "bro speak".


The author's about me section states " Maybe you've got a big paper coming up, and you haven't done the reading. Maybe there's this guy you've heard about, but you don't have the time to wade through the text yourself. Whatever, bro, I don't judge." 


That's  just the thing: it's all written in a colloquial, college-student tongue, precisely the audience it generally seems to be aimed at. The result? It feels something like reading comedy blogging (such as on collegehumor or cracked) Except this time instead of just giggles the reader is actually learning in a slightly more traditional sense of the word.


The usage of vulgarities is somewhat controversial. To be true to "bro speak" the author periodically includes several four-letter words. Now these interjections serve no (direct) purpose to the learning of philosophy, and appear to exist mainly for the preservation of character. If very sparsely used, those interjection can create the illusion of having a personal and very informal chat with the author, but if overdone shows the he/she might be trying too hard to seem "bro". 

A Multilingual Internet...

From the people that brought you captcha and recaptcha, Duolingo.com is the brainchild of Luis von Ahn. The basic idea is this: you learn a language (for free, a full $500 less than Rosetta Stone) by a type of immersion, while simultaneously translating the internet.

Isn't the internet already translated? I mean, you can make a website in any language you want! And if it's not, Google Translate will do it for you! Well the thing is, most successful websites are available primarily in English, thus are accessible mainly to English speakers. To use the example of Wikipedia. The English version of the site has almost 4 million articles. The Spanish version? Under a million. As far as translating programs go, often times, as I'm sure many of you have noticed, are unreliable methods of accurately translating information.

Luis von Ahn's dream is to, in teaching people new languages, translate the rest of the internet into every major language on the planet. Users are given sentences of increasing complexity in the language they wish to learn to translate, and answers can be compared to answers from other users and rated. After extended use the user begins to learn how the language works, and is busy at work translating snippets of web pages.

The internet's potential for massive collaboration could potentially be revolutionary in the greater world's understanding of language. Since new websites and blogs are being CONSTANTLY updated, with a plethora of untranslated text being formed every minutes, learners will have no shortage of things to translate, thus material to practice with. As a result, it is possible that the world will become more worldly. Demographic chunks that otherwise would never have seriously bothered understanding another language (particularly in America) now have access to that in a both intrinsically and extrinsically productive manner. With more and more people becoming accustomed to the annuls of different languages, the world becomes a more interconnected and inter-linguistic communication becomes more seamless.

Every language functions a different way, with certain things that simply cannot be translated while maintaining its original beauty. It is in attempting to translate these phrases, or words, the ones who reference a literary canon apart from our own, that we become exposed to the self-contained beauty of other languages. And even if sometimes we cannot understand it, it would be great step forward to at least appreciate it.

Here is Luis von Ahn's TED talk on the subject.

Duolingo is currently in beta testing, and should hopefully start-up soon.