Why are we doing this?
It all started with emails from within our department, which is the University of Wisconsin Colleges Philosophy Department. Collectively we are some two dozen philosophers spread over the state of Wisconsin on 13 different campuses. As such, we only see each other a few times each year, and heavily rely on electronic media to stay in touch.
A couple of years ago, some emails, mainly from Professor Roger Rigterink and Professor Mark Peterson started it all. One early effort from Mark, which, unlike Roger's, has survived the recycle bin:
Well, efforts like that opened the floodgates; we are a fairly diverse group of academics in our training and ongoing interests, and good friends as well. But we're not beyond good-natured one-upmanship. So at sporadic times over the next few semesters, someone would fire us up with a poem, and off we'd go to philosophy-haiku land. Here are some of those later efforts. . .
So we're trying this page as an experiment--to see if anyone else is as madly entranced by philosophical haiku as we are.