Personal Growth / Mind /

Philosophy


Because of the academic beginnings of the Internet, discussions about philosophers have flourished there. Much of this information is still stored and transferred using technologies such as gopher sites, ftp sites, and mailing lists. We're seeing an increasing number of classic philosophical works on-line, mostly in simple ASCII text format.

The Best

The Chinese Philosophy Page attempts to organize all of the Internet's resources regarding Chinese philosophy. Most of the texts available on-line are translations of Confucius (many in both ASCII and the BIG5 format used in Chinese computing environments) and Taoist texts by Chuang Tzu and others. Links to tangential topics such as Chinese culture, poetry, and language are also included. This site is admirable for its comprehensive nature.

Philosophy is a wacky timeline of philosophers and movements from Confucius to Ortega y Gasset to Philip K. Dick. You'll find great opinionated descriptions of each philosopher along the way, peppered with links to pertinent Usenet groups, gophers, and mailing lists. Perfect for someone wanting a slightly fun, slightly serious overview of the history of philosophy as well as for someone looking for links to relevant texts.

The Rest

The American Philosophical Association is a good jump-off point for investigations into philosophy on the Web. The site contains membership information, HTML versions of the group's proceedings, and a healthy set of links to other sources of information on philosophy conferences, philosophical societies, other Web resources, and even software for philosophers!

If you're interested in talking about contemporary philosophy, check out the Spoon Collective. It's dedicated to the free and open discussion of philosophical issues on the Internet. The site's mainly a collection of mailing lists, but it describes each one and points to a gopher where each is archived. List topics include the 20th-century French philosophers Bataille, Baudrillard, and Foucault, as well as more general topics like the avant-garde, Marxism, and philosophical aspects of technology.

Another HTML page sitting on top of ASCII texts, Marx and Engels' Complete Writings aims to offer every one of Marx and Engels' major works. Another Carnegie-Mellon University server also contains many other philosophical documents for works by Nietzsche, Plato, Rousseau, Kant, Montaigne, Hegel, Aristotle, Burke, and many others. A very well-rounded site.

Metaphysical Review is an electronic magazine. A free subscription gets you an e-mail copy in one of four file formats. Back issues and other information are stored on the Web site. Issues are available in text, Postscript, DVI, and Tex formats. So if you missed the article on "The Epistemology of Niels Bohr & Albert Einstein--Two forms of realism," you can get it here. GIF graphics are included.

Heidegger: Ereignis of Ekstasis is an odd collection of information about Martin Heidegger. Links include the Heidegger mailing list, a chronology and bibliography, translations of Greek fragments referred to in Heidegger's work, and abstracts of academic papers. Many of the links take you to sources elsewhere. Particularly interesting are several links to papers about Heidegger's views on technology.

The Nietzsche Page at the University of Southern California is an empty skeleton waiting to be fleshed out. There are sections for bibliographies, information on Nietzsche societies, mailing lists, and book reviews. Unfortunately many of the pages are empty, with requests for submissions. The listing of Nietzsche resources is not as definitive as other listings devoted to a single philosopher. The best feature is a page of Nietzsche quotes, which appear on a undulating blue background.

The first element of Augustine on the Internet is a large 300K file of a mosaic of St. Augustine: not a great web page design. There are English and Latin translations of his works (available via gopher), including the all-important Confessions, research papers, and even links to pop culture references to St. Augustine. Turn off graphics loading on your browser before visiting this site.

The Noam Chomsky Archive is a huge (over 3MB) searchable archive of articles, interviews, lectures, and reviews by the famous linguist, philosopher, and activist. A pretty definitive set of links leads to other sites of interest to Chomsky fans.

The Hume Archives is steadily growing from its initial incarnation as a repository of 18th-century writings of and about Hume. You'll find a few selections of Hume's work, reviews, commentaries, biographical essays, and writings by other Scottish philosophers. Like many academic archives, once you get past the initial page, you're dealing with ASCII text documents. More contemporary texts are being planned for the archive. If you enjoy this site, you might want to look into joining the Hume Society.

The Russell Archives offers few original works by Bertrand Russell, the renowned British philosopher and logician, but contains quotations, syllabi from courses about Russell, pointers to the Russell mailing list, and information on obtaining printed copies of the complete works of Russell. The archive to which the site name refers is the physical archive at McMaster University in Ontario, not an electronic archive.

Aristotle is an archive of works by Aristotle and many others in HTML format. Includes keyword searching!

Zippy the Pinhead will give you some random thoughts from the mind of Zippy, one of the great philosophers of our time.

Zeno, of paradox fame, was a pre-Socratic philosopher fond of the reductio ad absurdum argument, in which you reduce your opponent's position to the point of absurdity by using it to draw false conclusions. Try to solve the puzzle at Zeno's Coffeehouse. Use the mailto: URL to respond, and stay tuned for the results.

You can find complete information on Internet mailing lists having to do with philosophy at Morville and Clark's Philosophy Resources on the Internet. These mailing lists are where most of the buzz on certain philosophers can be found.

Plato: The Sophist is a straightforward, no-frills translation of Plato's The Sophist.

The Philosopher's Page offers forms-based searching for on-line texts in rich-text format by a variety of philosophers. The selection of philosophers is good, but the number of works on-line is pretty small.

"NIHILISM. There's nothing to it," reads the top of the Nihilism Association page. The same could be said of this page itself, which is mainly a few paragraphs of screed about Nietzsche and nihilism.

by Richard Butner

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Internet Life Vol.1 No.1 Winter 1995