About

This WordPress blog is written by me, Fergus Duniho, as a companion to my YouTube channel For the Love of Wisdom. Its name is based on the etymology of the word philosophy, whose Greek roots mean the love of wisdom. The idea behind this word is that philosophers are truth-seekers, which distinguished them from sophists, who claimed to already possess wisdom. In the pursuit of truth, philosophers asked questions and employed critical thinking, which sometimes put them in opposition to people who were looking to make names for themselves as wisemen. In the present day, there are many sophists in the world, frequently dressed in religious garb, telling people that they have all the answers straight from God. Freethought, which is the use of critical thinking in questioning religion, arose in opposition to this. Although their histories and focus have been different, freethought and philosophy really go hand-in-hand, as both are about using critical thinking to question established wisdom and search for truth. Accordingly, this site’s mission is to promote and further the love of wisdom, the seeking of truth, and the pursuit of happiness through the practices of freethought, philosophical inquiry, and critical thinking.

I myself am a former Christian who made the transition From Religion to Philosophy during college. I have studied philosophy and religion for years. I have a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Rochester. I wrote my dissertation on the nature of evil, and you can download free ebook copies here. During the 90’s, when I was still in grad school, I did an in-depth study of Christianity, determining once and for all that it wasn’t true. During this same time, I ran a GeoCities site at Athens/5195, which was critical of Christianity. The earliest surviving copy on Archive.org has a redirect to crossroads.freethought.net, where I set up my site after the owner of freethought.net offered me free space there for my site. Unfortunately, that domain suddenly stopped functioning one day, probably in 2000, since the latest copy of the site is dated May 11, 2000, and whoever now owns that domain just sits on it without doing anything with it. In the meantime, I was getting actively involved with The Chess Variant Pages, which I started devoting my free time toward. I invented various Chess variants and built Game Courier, a set of scripts for playing Chess variants online, from the ground up. In 2009, I created a channel on YouTube called For the Love of Wisdom and began making philosophy and freethought oriented videos for it. So that I could include transcripts of videos, companion pieces to videos, and blog posts without videos, I started a companion blog at Blog.com. Because of technical problems with that site, I migrated to a free web host and put this blog on the subdomain wisdom.is-best.net. Paying for a premium account with the same service, I started using the domain fortheloveofwisdom.net. The free subdomain worked so long as I stayed with that hosting service, but I eventually moved to another server, and that subdomain is no longer associated with this site.