"It was foreordained that Hegel, partisan of the concept, should find his maturest thinking take the form of an encyclopedia, the all-inclusive circular system whose prime significance lies precisely in circling around forever within itself, the system as system."
— Werner Marx, The Philosophy of F. W. J. Schelling, page x.
FreeKnowledgeCreator
| ♂ | This contributor to Wikipedia is male. |
 | This user has been on Wikipedia for 9 years, 9 months and 5 days. |
| 160,000 | This user has made over 160,000 edits. |
 | This user is a book collector. |
 | This user does not smoke. |
 | This user is interested in the ancient Celts. |
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I have started many articles about books. I enjoy helping to improve Wikipedia's coverage of non-fiction books, motivated by the hope that a better educated world would be a better world. I have devoted my most intensive efforts to works about human sexuality. Among the articles I started is that on Sexual Preference (1981). It is the article I have made the largest number of edits to (well over a thousand) and the article I have worked on for the longest time (more than six years now). It was promoted to good article status on August 12, 2016. Thanks to assistance from helpful editors, I got the articles on The Homosexual Matrix (1975) and Sexual Desire (1986) to good article status on February 17, 2017 and April 29, 2018 respectively.
I started articles about the following books: A Brief History of Blasphemy • A Critique of Pure Tolerance • A General Theory of Exploitation and Class • A History of the Mind • A Separate Creation • Adversus Valentinianos • After the Ball • An Essay on Marxian Economics • An Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth • An Inquiry into the Good • An Introduction to Karl Marx • An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion • Analyzing Marx • Anticlimax • Appearance and Reality • Art and Scholasticism • Aspects of Scientific Explanation • Before Pastoral • Christianity not Mysterious • Discourse, Figure • Ecology, community and lifestyle • Erkenntnis und wissenschaftliches Verhalten • Essays in Self-criticism • Essays on Truth and Reality • Ethical Relativity • Ethics • For Marx • Forms of Desire • Foucault • Foundations of the Science of Knowledge • Frege: Philosophy of Language • Frege: Philosophy of Mathematics • Freud: His Life and His Mind • Freud: The Mind of the Moralist • Freud and Philosophy • Freud and the Question of Pseudoscience • Freud Evaluated • Freud, Biologist of the Mind • Freud's Wishful Dream Book • From Disgust to Humanity • From Hegel to Nietzsche • Gay Marriage • Gay Science • Gay, Straight, and the Reason Why • Growing Up Straight by George Alan Rekers • Growing Up Straight by Peter and Barbara Wyden • Hegel's Ontology and the Theory of Historicity • History, Labour, and Freedom • Homosexual Behaviour: Therapy and Assessment • Homosexualities: A Study of Diversity Among Men and Women • Homosexuality: An Annotated Bibliography • Homosexuality: A Philosophical Inquiry • Homosexuality: A Psychoanalytic Study of Male Homosexuals • Homosexuality: Disease or Way of Life? • Homosexuality: Social, Psychological, and Biological Issues • Homosexuality and the Western Christian Tradition • Hormones and Brain Differentiation • Human Ethology • Human Sexuality • Interpretation and Social Criticism • Is Homosexuality a Menace? • Karl Marx: His Life and Environment • Karl Marx: His Life and Thought • Karl Marx: The Story of His Life • Karl Marx and the Close of His System • Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution • Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays • Les Illusions de la Psychanalyse • Lesbian Poetry: An Anthology • Lesbian/Woman • Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime • Liberalism and the Limits of Justice • Libidinal Economy • Logical Investigations • Love's Body • Love and Its Place in Nature • Main Currents of Marxism • Making Sense of Marx • Male Homosexuality in Four Societies • Marx after Sraffa • Marx and Modern Economics • Marx in the Mid-Twentieth Century • Marx's Concept of Man • Marx's Theory of Alienation • Marx's Theory of Ideology • Marxism: An Historical and Critical Study • Marxism and Morality • Marxism and the Oppression of Women • Masters and Johnson on Sex and Human Loving • Meaning and Necessity • Natural Law and Natural Rights • Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist • Oedipus in the Trobriands • On the Content and Object of Presentations • One Hundred Years of Homosexuality • Organization of Behavior • Patriarcha • Perceiving God • Phaedon • Philosophical essays on Freud • Philosophical Problems of Space and Time • Philosophy of Natural Science • Philosophy of the Unconscious • Play and Aggression: A Study of Rhesus Monkeys • Pregnancy, Birth and Abortion • Principles of the Theory of Probability • Psyche • Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint • Queer Science • Reason and Morality • Religion and Nothingness • Sambia Sexual Culture • Sex and Reason • Sex Offenders • Sexual Desire • Sexual Dissidence • Sexual Preference • Sexuality and Its Discontents • Shaping Your Child's Sexual Identity • Shelley: A Life Story • Signs of the Flesh • Spinoza • Studies in the Labour Theory of Value • Studies on Marx and Hegel • The Anita Bryant Story • The Assault on Truth • The Cambridge Companion to Freud • The Cambridge Companion to Marx • The Concept of Nature in Marx • The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology • The David Kopay Story • The Degrees of Knowledge • The Development of the Monist View of History • The Dialectic of Sex • The Differend • The Emergence of Probability • The Evolution of Human Sexuality • The Formation of the Economic Thought of Karl Marx • The Foundations of Psychoanalysis • The Freudian Fallacy • The Great Mother • The History of Human Marriage • The Homosexual Matrix • The Homosexualization of America • The Industrial Vagina • The Language of Music • The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud • The Man of Reason • The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein • The Marxists • The Memory Wars • The Mismeasure of Desire • The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas • The Origins and History of Consciousness • The Person and the Common Good • The Philosophy of 'As if' • The Political Unconscious • The Principle of Hope • The Sceptical Feminist • The Science of Desire • The Sexual Brain • The "Sissy Boy Syndrome" and the Development of Homosexuality • The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx • The Spinster and Her Enemies • The Structure of Science • The Taming of Chance • The Theory of Capitalist Development • The Theory of Good and Evil • The Unconscious before Freud • The Young Hegelians and Karl Marx • Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World • Thought and Action • Unauthorized Freud • Validation in the Clinical Theory of Psychoanalysis • Western Marxism • What is Philosophy? • What Wild Ecstasy • Who Stole Feminism? • Why Freud Was Wrong
Articles that I rewrote include those on the following books: Counterrevolution and Revolt • Critique of Dialectical Reason • Decline and Fall of the Freudian Empire • Freud: A Life for Our Time • Growing Up Absurd • History and Class Consciousness • Inner Experience • Irrational Man • Knowledge and Human Interests • Life Against Death • Marx and Human Nature • Nietzsche and Philosophy • Philosophical Explanations • Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession • Reading Capital • Reason and Revolution • Spinoza: Practical Philosophy • The Discovery of the Unconscious • The Flight to Lucifer • The Myth of Mental Illness • The Primal Scream • The Trauma of Birth • Thinkers of the New Left • Virtual Equality
Personal views[edit]
Of the books mentioned above, those I find most interesting or useful are A Critique of Pure Tolerance, Foucault, Freud: A Life for Our Time, Freud Evaluated, Homosexuality: A Psychoanalytic Study of Male Homosexuals, Homosexuality: Disease or Way of Life?, Irrational Man, Life Against Death, Love's Body, Main Currents of Marxism, Marx and Human Nature: Refutation of a Legend, Nietzsche and Philosophy, Philosophical essays on Freud, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, Reason and Revolution, Sexual Desire, Shelley: A Life Story, Spinoza, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, The Discovery of the Unconscious, The Evolution of Human Sexuality, The Foundations of Psychoanalysis, The Homosexual Matrix, The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein, The Mismeasure of Desire, The Philosophy of 'As if', The Primal Scream, The Trauma of Birth, Validation in the Clinical Theory of Psychoanalysis, Who Stole Feminism?, and Why Freud Was Wrong.
Since I have started many articles dealing with books about Sigmund Freud or psychoanalysis, I will mention that I have benefited from reading two crucial relevant articles, "Repression" by Donald W. MacKinnon and William F. Dukes, and "Freud, Kepler, and the clinical evidence", by the philosopher of science Clark Glymour. I would like to introduce them to those who may not be already familiar with them.
The article by MacKinnon and Dukes was published in Psychology in the Making, a 1962 anthology edited by Leo Postman. Glymour's article was first published in 1974 in Freud: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Richard Wollheim, and in 1982 reprinted with a new afterword in Philosophical essays on Freud, edited by Wollheim and James Hopkins. I first read Glymour's article, and it then drew me to the earlier article by MacKinnon and Dukes, who relate the history of attempts to test psychoanalytic ideas about repression in the United States, a history that, as they describe it, may strike some as comic, involving as it does one misunderstanding after another by the would-be testers of psychoanalytic theory. In their final implications, however, these misunderstandings are not comic but deeply tragic.
As MacKinnon and Dukes observe, by about 1930, American psychologists had begun to attempt to study repression in the laboratory. Rather than immediately trying to develop new techniques designed to test psychoanalytic assertions, they "searched the psychological literature to see if by chance some experiments undertaken to test other theoretical assertions might not incidentally throw light on the validity" of repression and other psychoanalytic concepts. One of those who did so was H. Meltzer, but because Meltzer was "not thoroughly versed in psychoanalytic writing", he misinterpreted Freud's view that the purpose of repression is to avoid "unpleasure", taking the term to mean simply something unpleasant, whereas for Freud it actually meant deep-rooted anxiety. Nevertheless, he "recognized that most of the investigations which he reviewed had not been designed specifically to test the Freudian theory of repression."
The psychologist Saul Rosenzweig maintained in 1934 that the studies Meltzer reviewed were flawed in that they involved "sensory stimuli unrelated to the theory of repression". MacKinnon and Dukes write that those psychologists who wanted to study repression "faced the necessity of becoming clear about the details of the psychoanalytic formulation of repression if their researches were to be adequate tests of the theory" but discovered "that to grasp clearly even a single psychoanalytic concept was an almost insurmountable task."
Psychoanalysts judged attempts to experimentally test repression a failure, rejecting them on the "sweeping grounds that whatever else these researches might be they simply were not investigations of repression." In 1934, when Rosenzweig sent Freud reports of his attempts to study repression, he discovered that Freud, though politely feigning interest, actually could not care less. Freud wrote back that he had examined Rosenzweig's "experimental studies for the verification of the psychoanalytic assertions", but that he could not "put much value on these confirmations because the wealth of reliable observations on which these assertions rest make them independent of experimental verification." While Freud considered studies like Rosenzweig's useless and unnecessary, but not actually harmful, most other psychoanalysts became convinced that the studies harmfully "misrepresented what psychoanalysts conceived repression to be."
Citing MacKinnon and Dukes, Glymour observes that psychoanalysts have argued that attempts to test psychoanalysis often involve testing hypotheses that are only "surrogates for the genuine article" and that "inferences from the falsity of such ersatz hypotheses to the falsity of psychoanalysis are not legitimate." Glymour thereby succinctly summarized problems with testing psychoanalysis that had first been noted in the 1930s, clearly pointing out that the problems MacKinnon and Dukes had identified with attempts to test psychoanalysis where the theory of repression is concerned also apply to testing psychoanalysis in general. Despite the fact that it is, in principle, not in the least difficult to understand, the importance of this contribution by Glymour has unfortunately never been fully appreciated. It is so far from being appreciated that one can even point to a prominent case in which mistaken claims that scholars would not be making had they read their Glymour form part of an entrenched orthodoxy.
My editing history[edit]
The userbox stating that I have made more than 160,000 edits reflects the number of edits I have made with all accounts and IPs. The breakdown is as follows: 125,334 edits as FreeKnowledgeCreator (as of November 14, 2018), 29,256 edits as Polisher of Cobwebs, 4,251 edits as ImprovingWiki, and an additional 1,199 edits from various IP addresses. Those interested in why I used more than one account should see the archived discussion here. Essentially, I reasoned that there was less chance of someone using my edits on articles about controversial topics to piece together enough information to deduce my real-life identity if I divided them between multiple accounts. This behavior nearly led to all of my accounts being blocked indefinitely, but fortunately that did not happen. Perhaps the real lesson of this experience is that it serves no purpose to remain anonymous.
I remain in two minds on the issue of anonymity. While I believe I should reveal my real name eventually and face the consequences of doing so, whatever they prove to be, I am going to remain anonymous for now, and I draw the attention of editors to the relevant section of Wikipedia's policy on harassment. While I will not reveal my actual name just now, I'll note that those of you who live in Auckland may see me. I'm the dude wearing the t-shirt with "I am Wikipedia editor FreeKnowledgeCreator" printed on it.
Barnstars[edit]
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The Tireless Contributor Barnstar
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| Just in recognition of your long term and continuous efforts to improve Wikipedia. Greyjoy talk 09:10, 17 May 2018 (UTC)
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