Quite a few people in Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States are looking online for information about Kantian morality. And the relationship between education and philosophy is piquing the interest of web surfers worldwide.
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which includes 1,478 vetted entries about all manner of philosophical topics, is updated almost daily, thanks to nearly 2,000 contributors.
How do we know this? The data comes from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the web’s oldest and arguably most credible open-access source of philosophical information.Launched two decades ago, years before Wikipedia existed, the site led the way in academic information sharing. It now includes 1,478 authoritative and vetted entries about all manner of philosophical topics. It is updated almost daily, thanks to about 2,000 contributors.
The encyclopedia averages more than a million Internet hits per week. Users include students, scholars, librarians and even military officials.
Due to its alternative scholarly publishing model – the encyclopedia is free and edited by experts – the SEP is one of the few of its kind.
“There was just no model for this, a reference work that was revisable where all the scholarly standards were maintained,” said Stanford’s Edward Zalta, the executive editor of the site and a senior research scholar at Stanford’s Center for the Study of Language and Information. The encyclopedia is one of the leading resources for scholarly research, Zalta said.