User:GreenLoeb
About me[edit]
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My love of encyclopedias goes back to my earliest memories, when I would dig through my grandfather’s 1978 World Book Encyclopedia set for hours every afternoon, from the time I got home from school till dinner, and often late into the night, well past my bedtime. I started editing Wikipedia in May of 2019, though I had been lurking and browsing Wikipedia since around 2008, when I was 10 years old. My username is a reference to the color of the Greek volumes published by the Loeb Classical Library. I hope to own every volume they publish one day.
Most of my work on Wikipedia has been as a WikiGnome, copy-editing, fixing syntax, punctuation, spelling, and grammar. I have honed these skills at my day job as an editor for magazines and book publishers, although I often procrastinate on my actual, paid work by editing on here instead. I was first motivated to stop lurking and become involved by the often egregious quality of prose on articles about relatively minor figures in the history of Western philosophy.
I am a graduate student in political theory, an Orthodox Christian, a twelfth-generation Appalachian, and an ex-Marxist who was so entranced by After Virtue that I now (often begrudgingly) identify as some kind of culturally conservative communitarian. (More exactly, I am highly sympathetic to Tolkien's anarcho-monarchism, but people look at you funny if you call yourself that.) I believe that the world is composed of ideas; you read that right, I think materiality is secondary. Thought has the highest degree of reality. I have a deep interest in marginal and radical political thought, motivated by my longstanding sense that liberalism is a philosophical dead end which degrades the ontological status of the human being; currently I'm digging into post-left anarchist thought, though in the past I've done deep dives into the counter-enlightenment, American conservative thought, distributism, and any number of variations on Marxism. These biographical facts guide a lot of what I edit on here. My own chief intellectual influences are the Hebrew prophets, Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, the English metaphysical poets, Tocqueville, Kierkegaard, Hannah Arendt, Christopher Lasch, T. S. Eliot, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Giorgio Agamben.
My areas of expertise are in the history of ideas; Platonism and Neoplatonism; Marxism, especially the Western Marxist tradition; the history and ethics of technology; conservatism as an intellectual movement; and continental philosophy (particularly philosophical hermeneutics and critical theory).
I read a lot, and you are welcome to follow me on Goodreads.