There is a great wealth of serious philosophy out there on the internet, though you have to dig deep through a great deal of philosophical detritus to get to the good stuff. Here are some of our picks for genuinely good philosophy on the web…
Audio
One of our favorite resources out there is Philosophy Bites: a collection of “podcasts of top philosophers interviewed on bite-sized topics”. The hosts, respected philosophers themselves, Nigel Warburton and David Edmonds, have interviewed a lot of renowned philosophers for the show, ranging from Daniel Dennett to Philip Pettit to Frank Jackson to Martha Nussbaum, all in easy-to-digest 15 minute sessions. The website itself is not exactly a treat to navigate, but you can skip the site and go directly to iTunes to download free podcasts. Or you can shell out three bucks for the iPhone app which I can vouch for being well worth it. They also have the MP3s hosted on libsyn.com, if you like to work through these things old school. One of my favorite podcasts is Nick Bostrom on the Simulation Hypothesis — absurdist metaphysics at its finest! — but really there are very few uninteresting interviews on the site.
Another great resource of philosophy audio is Philosophy Talk, a radio program with podcasts by eminent Stanford philosophers John Perry and Ken Taylor.
Encyclopedias
The next time you’re about to head over to Wikipedia to check out something philosophical, stop yourself and try either the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy or the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Both sites are peer-reviewed and generally are excellent sources for delving more deeply into philosophy. Check out the Stanford article on thought experiments, for example, or the IEP’s article on Searle’s Chinese Room. Both fine pieces.
Public Domain Texts
If you’re looking for public domain philosophy texts, there are plenty out there, although be prepared to find very little contemporary work. Everybody’s favorite public domain repository, Project Gutenberg, has a respectable collection of philosophy works. The EServer also has a collection of public domain philosophy texts available for download, along with some contemporary pieces that have been appropriately licensed.
If you are looking for more contemporary works online, your best bet is JStor, which scans most of the top philosophy journals and creates PDFs. There are a few journals and articles available for free through JStor to the general public, but if you really want to get the most out of the service, you have to be connected to a university that pays for their best services. If you are so connected, you will have an incredible wealth of philosophy articles at your disposal. If you are a philosophy teacher, or interested in philosophical pedagogy, check out the Philosophy Documentation Center — a subscription service that has all sorts of articles available about teaching philosophy.
Free Online Courses
Universities are starting to beef up their online course offerings, and there are several that offer free courses, consisting of syllabi, lecture notes, slides, audio, and video. Everything short of interaction with and feedback from professors. MIT was one of the first to make freely available such resources. Yale has a couple of courses available as well. As does Notre Dame.
We haven’t gone through any of these courses with a fine-tooth comb, so we can’t say how instructive they really are, but we certainly applaud academia for opening up the ivory tower a bit. If any of you have ever tried any of these courses, let us know what you thought!
The Profession
No list of professional philosophical resources would be complete without a link to the American Philosophical Association — the major professional organization for philosophy professors and students. Their website could use an update from 1999, but there is a good amount of information on the site regarding the profession of philosophy.
If you’re thinking about grad school in philosophy, you should definitely check out the Philosophical Gourmet Report — Brian Leiter’s ranking of graduate programs in philosophy in the English-speaking world.
Let us know if you think of other good web resources for philosophy lovers.