That's an interesting project! I'm currently debating with myself as to whether to do such a thing with SEP or with the excellent Philosophy Compass. Or perhaps with a Routledge/Oxford/Cambridge Handbook/Companion 🤔
And keep the hair dude! Wasn't it written on Plato's Academy to "Let no one enter who does not have a parallel-postulate-puncturing perm"?
What I like about SEP is that they write about very difficult topics in a normal, everyday writing style. Most academic writing is painful to read. Philosophy is a little better than most other subjects in the humanities but still. Most academic writing is horrible. SEP is awesome.
I did this a while back, just deep diving into the Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and following the links in each article. It gave me a decent introduction to a variety of topics. I also discovered there was a "feminist perspective" for basically everything at this point.
I wonder if it could even be done for other disciplines. Analytic philosophy is unique in that's it's easy to understand even very technical arguments with minimal background knowledge. I can pick up any analytic philosophy paper in a professional journal and read and understand it, usually with no problem, despite having essentially no formal training in the field. In fact, I find it much easier to do so than in the fields I actually have a degree in. I'm not sure is this in an inherent property of philosophy or if analytic philosophers are just really good at clear writing, but whatever the case is, I think it's a necessary condition to make something like the SEP.
That's an interesting project! I'm currently debating with myself as to whether to do such a thing with SEP or with the excellent Philosophy Compass. Or perhaps with a Routledge/Oxford/Cambridge Handbook/Companion 🤔
And keep the hair dude! Wasn't it written on Plato's Academy to "Let no one enter who does not have a parallel-postulate-puncturing perm"?
What I like about SEP is that they write about very difficult topics in a normal, everyday writing style. Most academic writing is painful to read. Philosophy is a little better than most other subjects in the humanities but still. Most academic writing is horrible. SEP is awesome.
What I dislike is that the articles are soooo comprehensive. If I just want to understand a topic, I go to the Internet Encyclopaedia of Philosophy.
Very cool! Will you be writing about each entry?
Not each one — sone are very boring! But I’m sure they’ll trickle into future articles
I agree that the SEP is fantastic. I cowrote one entry a few years ago. But many of the entries are really long!
I did this a while back, just deep diving into the Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and following the links in each article. It gave me a decent introduction to a variety of topics. I also discovered there was a "feminist perspective" for basically everything at this point.
Why do you think there are so few other disciplines that have an SEP equivalent?
Because other disciplines suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck probably
I wonder if it could even be done for other disciplines. Analytic philosophy is unique in that's it's easy to understand even very technical arguments with minimal background knowledge. I can pick up any analytic philosophy paper in a professional journal and read and understand it, usually with no problem, despite having essentially no formal training in the field. In fact, I find it much easier to do so than in the fields I actually have a degree in. I'm not sure is this in an inherent property of philosophy or if analytic philosophers are just really good at clear writing, but whatever the case is, I think it's a necessary condition to make something like the SEP.
Here's most of the answers: https://kaiserbasileus.substack.com/p/metaphysics-in-a-nutshell
The SEP is a great resource but it's academic, it only teaches the controversy, ( all the biggest ideas ) not the truth.
Where is the poll you promised? I want my, uhmmm, two minutes back
I’ve added one
Didn’t know there was even a polling feature
:)))
I didn’t like that it didn’t cite any gender critical authors—without that, you don’t get a sense of the field, which is the point of SEP articles