About the
Guide to Philosophy on the Internet
Peter Suber, Philosophy Department, Earlham College

To submit a site:

Simply send me email containing the URL and perhaps a brief description. Please make clear that you are submitting the URL for my philosophy guide. That's all there is to it.

I always reply to email submissions, though sometimes with a form letter. If you don't hear from me in a week, then either I'm on vacation or my reply bounced. If I'm on vacation, then I'll reply when I return.

It would save us both time if you would take a quick look at my list of the kinds of philosophical site that I deliberately omit (below). Of the dozen or so types that I omit, I most often receive submissions for (1) online books or essays and (2) syllabi, hand-outs, and lecture notes.

  • If you have an online book or essay, please submit your URL to Noesis, not to me. (Noesis is edited by Anthony Beavers and myself.)
  • If you have online course materials, please seek a link from Andy Carpenter's Course Materials in Philosophy, not from me.
  • If you get a link from either of these sites, then your page will be included in the Hippias index, just as if you had received a link from me.

For more information, see my FAQ below.

Thanks, Peter.

What omissions are deliberate?

Thoughts on scope

On the two editions of this guide

Answers to Frequently Asked Questions

I try to answer all my email. But many correspondents ask the same sorts of questions. By putting some of these questions and answers here, I might be able to save us both time.

What's coming in the future?

What can you do to advance the cause of online philosophy?

Awards won by this guide


One of the NCSA
Top 5 Sites of the Day
for April 26, 1996.

Golden House-Sparrow Award
Site of the day, November 2, 1996

Cool site of the month
April, 1997

Site of the day
August 13, 1997





Although I want to advance the cause of online philosophy, I want to keep this cause in perspective. My view is that online philosophy can and should be spectacular, the way great libraries are spectacular, but that it will always be secondary to reading hard books in quiet places and thinking and writing about them. Technology can only support this enterprise so far. In fact, though philosophy is easier to put on the web than art history or astronomy, I am convinced that the web can do much more for art history and astronomy than it can do for philosophy. The internet is a supportive service, like libraries, telephones, photocopying machines, and coffee urns. Perhaps it is a more fundamental innovation, on the order of movable type, rag paper, and artificial light. Philosophy is easier if these supportive services and technological innovations are more friendly and functional, but they should facilitate, not distract us, from our hard work. (See Ernst Cassirer's recollection of how a great library —the Warburg Library in Hamburg— helped him finish thinking and writing The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, in the Preface to vol. 2, Yale 1955, at p. xviii.) My purpose in maintaining this guide is to help realize the possibilities of online philosophy without exaggerating or underestimating their importance. For more reflections on these lines, see my essay, The Database Paradox.

I welcome comments and suggestions of all kinds.

Return to the guide: single-file edition, multi-file edition.

[Blue
Ribbon] Peter Suber, Department of Philosophy, Earlham College, Richmond, Indiana, 47374, U.S.A.
765 / 983-1214. peters@earlham.edu. Copyright © 1996-2000, Peter Suber.