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Peter Ludlow

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Peter Ludlow
EraContemporary philosophy
RegionWestern Philosophy
SchoolAnalytic philosophy
Main interests
Philosophy of language, linguistics, philosophy of mind
Notable ideas
implicit comparison class

Peter Ludlow (January 16, 1957), who also writes under the name Urizenus Sklar, is a professor of philosophy and linguistics at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Before moving to Michigan, Ludlow taught for several years at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and was Visiting Professor of Philosophy at Syracuse University and Cornell University. His research areas include the conceptual issues in cyberspace, particularly questions about cyber-rights and the emergence of laws and governance structures in and for virtual communities. His popular books include High Noon on the Electronic Frontier and Crypto Anarchy, Cyberstates, and Pirate Utopias. His professional books include Semantics, Tense and Time: an Essay in the Metaphysics of Natural Language. Ludlow participated as a member of the online community The Well, and also participated in virtual gaming communities such as Second Life and The Sims Online, where he took the character of an online journalist.

MTV.com has described Ludlow as one of the 10 most influential video game players of all time, in part due to his role in showing how video game companies can be challenged as part of the gameplay. In the most famous controversy, reported in the New York Times and elsewhere, Ludlow began a virtual newspaper called The Alphaville Herald and reported on events in the Electronic Arts Corporation online game "The Sims Online" -- including some blistering editorials against Electronic Arts Corporation and their failures at managing and policing the gamespace. Ludlow was subsequently kicked out of the game by Electronic Arts.

Ludlow (with the journalist Mark Wallace) has cowritten a book to appear with The University of Michigan Press about his career as a virtual world journalist titled, Only a Game: Online Worlds and the Virtual Journalist Who Knew Too Much. It is slated to appear in September 2007.

In addition to his academic and virtual lives, Ludlow has forged a reputation for holding soirees for members of the gaming and hacking communities, including an event at the State of Play and South by Southwest conferences. Ludlow has used these attempts to encourage game developers and hackers to think of themselves as celebrities and intellectual shakers and movers (as artists and the literati have in years past).

Some of these events feature what Ludlow has called "game instantiation events" -- in effect, bringing computer games to real life in some mildly subversive form. In one Ludlow soiree in Austin Texas, Make Magazine editor Phillip Torrone reprogrammed a Roomba robatic vacuum cleaner to be remotely directed, dressed it in a green frog suit, and played "real frogger" on 6th Street in Austin, Texas. Ludlow has described the events as attempts to subvert the comfortable if flawed distinction between the real world and virtual reality, as well as challenges to suburban conceptions of street decorum in the contemporary United States.

Education

Ludlow has studied with Noam Chomsky at MIT, but received his PhD. in philosophy from Columbia University in 1985, under the direction of Charles Parsons. His dissertation was on the Syntax and Semantics of Referential Attitude Reports. He received his B.A. in 1979 from Bethel College in St. Paul Minnesota.

Partial bibliography

Ludlow's extensive publication list and curriculum vitae can be found here [1], along with a list of his Recent Books. Many of his publications are online

See also

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