The advent of the Web is one of the defining technological events of the twentieth-first century, yet its impact on the fundamental questions of philosophy has not yet been widely explored, much less systematized. The Web, as today implemented on the foundations of the Internet, is broadly construed as an information space, the space of all items of interest (“resources”) identified by URIs (Uniform Resource Identifiers, such as “http://www.example.org”). Originally conceived as an hypertext system of linked documents, today the Web is rapidly evolving as a universal platform for data and computation, as URIs are used to identify everything from data on the Semantic Web and mobile code in Web applications. Even more swiftly is the Web-driven transformation of many previously unquestioned philosophical concepts of privacy, authority, meaning, identity, belief, intelligence, cognition, and even embodiment in surprising ways. In response, we hope to provoke the properly philosophical question of whether there is a consistent new branch or practice of philosophy that can weave these changes to technology and society into a coherent whole and have a real social impact?

We welcome all submissions of a philosophical nature involving the Web.

Some questions that may be addressed include:

Is the existence of the philosophy of the Web justified?
What is the precise relationship between a more general philosophy and the Web?
What are the historical and philosophical roots of the philosophy of the Web?
Is “philosophical engineering” a genuine philosophical practice?
Are philosophers trading places with engineers or craftsmen?
Do philosophers of the Web have a special responsibility?
Are there unifying principles underlying the architecture of the Web?
How are URIs related to the naming and reference in the philosophy of language?
Is the Web understood as a means to signify tied to freedom of speech?
What is the impact on models built from massive amounts of Web data on philosophy?
What is the impact of search engines like Google on questions of knowledge and belief?
Does the increasing mediation of our social interactions by the Web challenge our existing conceptions of privacy and individuality?
Can human cognition genuinely be extended by the Web?
How does the philosophy of the Web interact with other empirically-informed philosophical questions around neuroscience and cognitive science?
Does the communication and ubiquity accessibility of the Web alter our notion of embodiment?