About This Web Site

This site is named after the magnum opus of Immanuel Kant, who is widely considered to have been a great guy. In particular, he is regarded by many as the greatest philosopher of modern times (that is, since around 1700).

But this blog is not specifically about him, though he will no doubt feature in it. It is about my exploration of philosophy, now that I have decided to take it more seriously. I realized it was no good just reading the biographies of fascinating minds; I ought to actually explore the philosophy itself. So I'm now it studying quite formally, though independently.

I see this endeavour, at least symbolically, as a quest to read and understand Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, which was first published in 1781. It is a notoriously difficult book, and to make matters worse he changed his mind about a few things and partly rewrote it, leaving us with the task of weaving it all together. I am hoping that the experience of reading it will be better than I have been led to believe, but I also have to face the possibility that it will be considerably worse.

At the time of writing, I have a few ideas of what to write about, but nothing definite. I expect that some of it will be about science, art and politics, rather than philosophy per se. Hey, it’s my blog: I can do what I like.

I genuinely hope you find something here you love or hate or find interesting, and that you will leave a comment.

But Who Am I?

My name is Alistair Robinson, I live in Edinburgh and I run Inventive Management with my partner Laura McGregor, doing web design, software development, social media marketing, and stuff like that. I also play alto saxophone and take photographs with fifty-year-old East German cameras. Find me on the web in these places:

alistairrobinson.co.uk
inventivemanagement.co.uk
Flickr
@saxjam on Twitter
My books on Readernaut

Get in touch at alistair [dot] robinson [at] gmail.com.

Technology

This site runs on a simple blog system that I built with the Django Web Framework, which is the meaning of the pink pony at the foot of every page. Why build a blog app, when there are plenty of good ones around? Well, Wordpress is great but it's a monster that requires hacking and tuning to make it fit-for-purpose and running smoothly. It gives me piece of mind to have a system which is a tiny fraction of the size and does exactly what I need in the way I want it to. "Don't reinvent the wheel" is an over-used expression.

The site is hosted by the wonderful alwaysdata.

Typography and Stuff

Update (August 2011): The site ran for a year with an odd combination of fonts, with the very pleasant and readable old standby font Georgia for the body text. Now I’ve bitten the bullet and decided to try something else: all text on the site is now in the Lora typeface from the Cyreal type foundry, served up by Google Web Fonts.

Images which are not my own are usually from Wikimedia Commons, and the little tag and book icons on the home page are from Gentleface.