Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (IEP) is a free online encyclopedia on philosophical topics and philosophers founded by James Fieser in 1995. The current general editors are James Fieser (Professor of Philosophy at the University of Tennessee at Martin) and Bradley Dowden (Professor of Philosophy at California State University, Sacramento). The staff also includes numerous area editors as well as volunteers.

About the IEP

The IEP is a non-profit organization that receives no funding. The mission statement of the IEP is as follows:

The entire website was redesigned in the summer of 2009, moving from static HTML pages to the open-source publishing platform WordPress.

Scholarly standards

According to the IEP, the quality of its articles is "at the same level as that of the best multi-volume encyclopedias of philosophy which appear in print." This is achieved primarily by recruiting well-qualified contributors and using a peer review process that is "rigorous and meets high academic standards". The encyclopedia uses a traditional, closed procedure for commissioning and refereeing its permanent articles (comparable to that of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: see peer review), but sometimes uses material from public domain resources to create temporary stop-gap articles until permanent articles are completed.

Online encyclopedia

An online encyclopedia is an encyclopedia accessible through the internet. The idea to build a free encyclopedia using the Internet can be traced at least to the 1994 Interpedia proposal; it was planned as an encyclopedia on the Internet to which everyone could contribute materials. The project never left the planning stage and was overtaken by a key branch of old printed encyclopedias.

Digitization of old content

In January 1995, Project Gutenberg started to publish the ASCII text of the Encyclopædia Britannica, 11th edition (1911), but disagreement about the method halted the work after the first volume. For trademark reasons this has been published as the Gutenberg Encyclopedia. In 2002, ASCII text of and 48 sounds of music was published on Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition by source; a copyright claim was added to the materials, but it probably has no legal validity. Project Gutenberg has restarted work on digitising and proofreading this encyclopedia; as of June 2005 it had not yet been published. Meanwhile, in the face of competition from rivals such as Encarta, the latest Britannica was digitized by its publishers, and sold first as a CD-ROM and later as an online service. Other digitization projects have made progress in other titles. One example is Easton's Bible Dictionary (1897) digitized by the Christian Classics Ethereal Library. Probably the most important and successful digitization of an encyclopedia was the Bartleby Project's online adaptation of the Columbia Encyclopedia, tenth Edition, in early 2000 and is updated periodically.

Encyclopedia of Philosophy

The Encyclopedia of Philosophy is one of the major English encyclopedias of philosophy.

The first edition of the encyclopedia was in eight volumes, edited by Paul Edwards, and published in 1967 by Macmillan; it was reprinted in four volumes in 1972.

A "Supplement" volume, edited by Donald M. Borchert, was added to the reprinted first edition in 1996, containing articles on developments in philosophy since 1967, covering new subjects and scholarship updates or new articles on those written about in the first edition.

A second edition, also edited by Borchert, was published in ten volumes in 2006 by Thomson Gale. Volumes 1–9 contain alphabetically ordered articles. Volume 10 consists of:

Its ISBNs are 0-02-865780-2 as a hardcover set, and 0-02-866072-2 as an e-book.

See also