Helpful Philosophy Reference Links

Some of you may already be aware of these, but I thought it would be good for the folks in the Club to know about some websites that have generally reliable reference-type information about philosophers and philosophical terms, concepts, views, and arguments. Below I've listed a few. But, as with anything on the internet, take them with a grain of salt and use them at your own risk. Obviously, none of what's written on any of these sites is the Word of God or even the Final Word on these matters (though, I suppose, in some cases, it might be; the trouble is: how would one know for sure, unless one did considerably more research?).

1. http://plato.stanford.edu/contents.html
"Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy", run by two philosophy profs at Stanford U: Edward Zalta and Uri Nodelman. All articles in this Encyclopedia are peer-reviewed by professional philosophers (see http://plato.stanford.edu/board.html); and the author of each article is identified, and it's usually somebody who knows what they're talking about. The trouble is that the Encyclopedia is hardly exhaustive.

2. http://www.iep.utm.edu/
"The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy", run by James Fieser (philosophy prof at U of Tennessee, Martin) and Bradley Dowdin (philosophy prof at Cal State U, Sacramento). This Encyclopedia seems to have more articles than the Stanford one; but in some cases the articles aren't as high in quality as those in the Stanford Encyclopedia. Only some of the articles in the Internet Encyclopedia are peer-reviewed (see http://www.iep.utm.edu/1/editors.htm), and only some of its articles have authors who are actually identified by name. Those whose authors aren't identified "have largely been adapted from public domain sources"; so it's anybody's guess who wrote these.

3. http://www.philosophypages.com/dy/
"A Dictionary of Philosophical Terms and Names" by Garth Kemerling (PhD in philosophy from U of Iowa). Evidently, all the entries in this Dictionary were written by Kemerling. Many of the entries are helpful, particularly if you're stuck with some philosophical term and you have nowhere else more reliable to find an explanation.

4. http://www.rep.routledge.com/
"Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy Online". This is the best philosophy encyclopedia there is on the internet, and maybe the best there is period. The trouble is that it isn't free. I include it here just to let you all know about it. Believe it or not, some unversities actually provide their students free access to the Routledge Encyclopedia. But Longwood probably never will, at least not in the near future, and especially not if Longwood never has a philosophy major....

By the way, you all should know, if you don't already, that Wikipedia is truly awful as a source of information (since anybody can contribute to it and anybody does contribute to it), though it can sometimes be helpfully used as a way of finding other sources that are reliable. That is, what Wikipedia articles say is extremely unreliable; but its articles sometimes mention or refer to non-Wikipedia sources which turn out to be reliable. Still, a Google search is often just as good for this purpose....