Sometimes serious ideas emerge from the strangest places. Last week Harman tossed an offhand question onto his blog: Who is the most overrated philosopher?. It sparked quite serious discussion all over. So serious that before long, Harman found himself wondering if an anthology of opinions on "overrated philosophers" could indeed become a serious work of philosophy.
I now find myself in a similar position. Late last week I'd started working on a philosopher parlor game to answer Harman's, but this weekend it magically transformed into a serious project. As if I need another one of those.
I was procrastinating during the arduous process of completing my talk for the microtalk session at the Game Developers Conference in two weeks. I was thinking about the overrated philosopher issue, and what other angles one might take on it. I wondered, how many philosophers are we able to recognize?
Thanks to the format of the microtalks, I had constraint on the brain. My curiosity took the form of fashioning portraits of philosophers in 7x7 pixels. Here are some samples:






Before I knew it I'd done sixty of them.
Then it struck me: what if I paired condensed form of a philosopher with a very condensed take on their thinking? I decided to match the 7x7 pixel constraint with its written equivalent: a 7x7 letter slab poem (that is, seven lines of seven letters each). Furthermore, and keeping with the theme of sevens, the poems would be composed in iambic heptameter (that is, each would be seven feet long). Behold a proof of concept, Immanuel Kant:

Note that the seven-letter lines really push me to consolidate ideas into simpler and more compact terms. There's just no room for haughty philosopher phrases like "transcendental idealism." Seeing this example made me think that this really might be a worthwhile creative exercise. And maybe even a worthwhile philosophical one.
So, now I'm thinking about a book of philosopher pixel- and slab poetry. You can imagine the layout: the image would appear on the verso of a spread, the poem on the recto.
The question is, who would publish such a thing? It's hard to pin down its genre, exactly. Then there's the matter of form: the book would have to be square in shape, of course, and printed in color. That's a custom job for sure, and a relatively expensive one compared to black text in a standard trim size.
Indeed, I decided to post about this project at such an early stage partly to see if I could spur interest from or recommendations for a publisher. I'm completely serious about this, even if it takes a while to realize (I have other books to finish first!).
In the meantime, I still want to run my own little philosophy parlor game. Let's do it in the form of a contest. To the first person to correctly identify all six of the pixel-philosophers above, I will award the following:
- a custom seven-pixel-square portrait of the winner, or anyone else of his or her choosing
- a signed copy of this book, if ever it appears in print
Put your responses in the comments below, listing your guesses of the names of the philosophers in order of their appearance above (top left to bottom right). I may or may not intervene in the comments depending on how difficult this proves.
Update: After just over a day since I posted, Michael Austin succeeds! Now the question is, should I restart the contest with new philosophers...
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