Hi there, it has been a while, hasn’t it? Well, you’ll be hearing more from Extinct this year: we’re re-launching with a new approach, and new management.
Extinct was officially launched waaaay back in January 2016. We published at least four posts a month for two years, switching to one post a month in 2018 and—as is the wont of such blogs—petering by the end of 2019, managing over 130 posts. The blog never officially stopped, but rather the four of us became less able to contribute through a combination of burnout (four posts a month between the four of us for two years), moving on to other things and, we like to imagine, the blog having more-or-less met the goals we’d set for it.
In 2015, the four of us—Adrian Currie, Leonard Finkelman, Joyce Havstad and Derek Turner—thought the time was ripe to promote the philosophy of paleontology, and that a blog would be the right venue for it. We hoped that, if the blog were popular enough, we’d have less discussions with colleagues that began with: “you do the philosophy of what…?”.
We also wanted a space where we could share and develop ideas, and to reach out to folks in other disciplines. Given that we were in the business of trying to open up new arenas for research, we wanted to avoid founder effects (see Joyce’s post about such effects in the philosophy of biology) and, as such, aimed to include as many perspectives as we could. So, the blog consisted of regular contributions from the four of us peppered with regular (and wonderful!) guest posts from paleontologists, historians, social scientists, paleoartists, and sundry others (see this post for a fuller account of what we were trying to do, along with some, if we might say so ourselves, pretty adorable pictures).
Writing at the tail-end of 2022 (2023 by the time this appears!) the philosophy of paleontology (or the historical sciences, or the paleosciences, or the geosciences – let’s not get caught up on labels) seems to us to be thriving. We certainly have less of those “philosophy of what?” conversations. Most especially, a host of researchers, particularly early career researchers, are exploring the boundaries of philosophy, paleontology, and related disciplines. A few recent examples range from developing the notion of the living fossil concept, querying how explanations of mass extinctions develop and how they might connect with the ‘sixth’ mass extinction, novel accounts of narrative, a whole collected volume at the borders of archaeology and philosophy, new appraisals of uniformatarianism, examinations of evidence in archaeoastronomy, and the list goes on. As such, it seems time for the blog to restart, but now more explicitly with an eye towards providing a platform for all these new folks entering the discussion.
Max Dresow has agreed to take over the blog: we are passing the baton into his capable hands. In its new incarnation Extinct will be less centered on a set of specific contributors, instead focused on guest posts. The four of us will still be around, helping out here and there and maybe even (gosh!) providing the occasional post. So, look forwards to hearing from him soon.
The four of us would not only like to thank Max for taking the blog forwards, but to once again thank all of the contributors and readers that made the project such a rich delight for those four years. Long may Extinct continue under its new management!