Spam (unsolicited commercial bulk email) comes in countless flavors nowadays: cheap watches, pirate software, mortgage loans, prescription drugs, pornographic images, and on and on. But have you ever seen philosophical spam? Why aren't there mass mailings asking about the meaning of life, or what "truth" is, or how to achieve wisdom?

Well, perhaps it's simply wrong, and Enlightened Ones don't want to achieve good via bad means? Or possibly it has been tried, but anti-spam filters were trivially built to block message traffic containing words such as "epistemology" and "ontological"? And maybe it's simply too ineffective as a consciousness-raiser, so cost-sensitive sages prefer to hang out in the Stoa, or the subway, or the bar?

But the most important reason for the absence of philo-spam? There's no money in it!

TopicHumor - TopicPhilosophy - 2004-12-01

(correlates: YearInIdeas2004, PhilosophicalBumpersticker, PickyAboutFacts, ...)