Gems of the Web

Each month (from 1997-2002) Episteme Links recognized a Philosophy website as being a "Gem of the Web". These sites were the best of the best (general philosophy link and search sites were not eligible). The descriptions provided below were accurate at the time of the award, but may no longer reflect the scope or value of the particular site.

Please Note: The Gem of the Web program was discontinued in late 2002. In its place I have created a one-page, categorized directory of the best philosophy websites, which includes past winners of the monthly Gem award. It is intended to be a great place to start for anyone new to philosophy on the Internet.

Winners included the following (most recent first):

September/October 2002 Winners: The MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive has long been deserving of recognition from EpistemLinks.com. The site has been in operation since the early days of the Web, and has grown steadily over the years. By now it is simply bursting with great content that anyone interested in philosophy would be interested in. Although focused on the history of Mathematics, such a resource must naturally cover a great many philosophically-related topics and numerous thinkers who did work in both disciplines. This latter set includes both well-known philosophers such as Aristotle and Descartes, but also includes lesser known thinkers such as Porphyry and Nicholas of Cusa. EL has long linked to more than 50 of the rich pages of this site, though they are only a fraction of the 1300+ biographies that the site provides in total. But that is just the beginning, as additional features include nearly 2,000 images of mathematicians, a 60+ famous curves index, birthplace maps, birthday information, a special section highlighting female mathematicians, a massive bibliography, and links to additional resources in mathemetics. Because the site's design is very simple in appearance, this makes it very easy to use with any browser. There are numerous additional features and sections that I haven't described, so you would do well to simply visit this site and see it all for yourself!

June/July/August 2002 Winners: Two of the oldest, best online resources in philosophy are actually not Web sites at all. The PHILOS-L and PHILOSOP email distribution lists pre-date the explosion of the Web, and have been providing their audiences with a great deal of value over the years. PHILOS-L is moderated by Prof. Stephen R. L. Clark from the University of Liverpool. It got started way back in 1989&150;eons ago in Internet-time–and the list archives date all the way back. Subscribers receive timely announcements for conferences, calls-for-papers for journals, and job postings. It is also used for oddball queries, including quote references, contact information, syllabus planning assistance, and much more. Philosophical discussion occassionally erupts, but this is usually quickly taken "off-list" to keep the volume of email reasonable. As it was initially created as a resource for philosophers on the British Isles, many of the annnouncements are about goings-on there. However, although Europe-related items are still dominant, it has branched out and covers philosophy around the world. PHILOSOP, moderated by Prof. Istvan Berkeley from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, has also been providing many similar values to its subscribers for a long time. Conference announcements, job postings, new online resources, calls-for-papers, etc., make Philosop a must for keeping up with the world of academic philosophy. As a seemingly perfect balance, PHILOSOP also covers events the world-over, but with a focus on North America (it includes members from every continent except Antarctica!). If you subscribe to both of these lists, you will receive some duplicate postings. But given the level of email each produces, you should use inbox-filters to make handling the traffic easy (most modern email client applications support such features). I hope the moderators of these two lists, and all those who participate, keep up their fine work!

May 2002 Winner: For only the second time, EL is awarding a website a followup Gem of the Month award. The Philosophers' Magazine was given the ninth award way back in September of 1998—which seems like ancient history in cyber-time. Since then, the online counterpart to the popular British-based print magazine has added numerous features and content. Originally the site offered online articles, book reviews, and an event calendar. Over the years the content archive has grown to now include some 500+ articles, including primers, reviews, debates, and more. While most of this content is available to subscribers only, TPM provides several dozen articles as part of three over-arching "portals", focusing on philosophy and science, religion, and ethics. More interesting, perhaps, is that TPM has expanded well beyond articles. They now provide a selection of RealPlayer audio files called "TPM Radio". They've created a philosophical quotations database (800+) which can be searched online, and which has also spawned a quotation email service and a Windows-based quotation program available for download. Their "Philosophy Cafe" section is intended to "include material which is designed to appeal to people who are taking their first steps in philosophy." And lastly, their ever-growing "Fun and Games" provides numerous philosophy-related diversions such as a philosophy quiz application, a philosophical consistency checker, and a "Battleground God" to test the consistency of your beliefs about religions. All of these features (and more) indicate that TPM Online continues to grow!

April 2002 Winner: Thoemmes Press, as you may know, is a large and well-respected academic publisher. Like other major publishers, their website naturally provides ample information on their products. However, in recent years, they have added a wealth of useful content to this site as well. It is the combination of several of these resources that makes their website deserving of the Gem of the Month award. For example, Thoemmes is providing a free online Encyclopedia of the History of Ideas. It already has around 100 entries, on figures in all fields, but including philosophers such as Francis Bacon, George Berkeley, John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, and more (Over two dozen of these entries are highlighted in the reference links column in the Philosophers section at EpistemeLinks). A second collection of written content that Thoemmes is providing is a selection of Introductions from their published books. These are often lengthy and quite informative pieces, and the current collection includes works on Baruch Spinoza, Henry More, F.H. Bradley, Josiah Royce, James Ferrier, Giordano Bruno, and more. Thoemmes also provides a large gallery of images of scientists, philosophers, and other crucial figures in the history of ideas. Peter Abelard, Jeremy Bentham, August Comte, Immanuel Kant, John Duns Scotus, and many more–hundreds in fact. These images are high-quality portraits, and can be downloaded and used for non-commercial purposes (high-resolution images are also available). I encourage you to visit their website and use the free reference materials they are providing.

March 2002 Winner: The Phil-Sci Archive is "an electronic archive for preprints in the philosophy of science." It is a free service, sponsored by the Philosophy of Science Association, the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh, and the University Library System at the University of Pittsburgh. Built on the eprints.org open archive software, this Web site provides easy access to mostly preliminary works in numerous areas in the Philosophy of Science. Authors can submit their works to the archive, in order to better circulate their papers for comments and discussion prior to (or after) publication. You can search the entire archive by keyword, or browse by subject area. There are several dozen such categories, including Causation, the Realism/Anti-Realism debate, the Philosophy of Biology, Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Cosmology and many others. Once you have registered (free), you are eligible to receive emails automatically whenever a new paper is added to the archive, and you can customize these emails to limit them to papers in your areas of interest only. The site is very user-friendly, providing multiple "help" resources, including a very informative FAQ page. From what I can tell, the archive has perhaps 300 papers at present, most of them from the past two years. And unlike many other sites (EL included), the PhilSci archive is not providing links to outside resources—it actually stores the papers locally (as Word, PDF, PS, or another format). Regardless of exactly how many papers are included, this site surely provides value to anyone publishing, researching, or otherwise interested in the Philosophy of Science (see also EL Phil. of Science area).

February 2002 Winner: The Philosophical Lexicon by Daniel Dennett (provided on the Web by Blackwell Publishers) is arguably the most hysterically funny jab at the subject of philosophy and its practitioners. Arranged as a dictionary, it satirically purports to be an important list of technical jargon in the field. Built up over a few decades (in its 8th edition, though not updated in the past decade), the entries span practically every area of philosophy and hardly any prominent names are spared its taunts. Of course, all of the humorous entries are "insider jokes", in that if you aren't familiar with the subject, you won't laugh -- at least not for the reason intended. Consider, for instance, the term that started it all: the verb "to Quine", which means "To deny resolutely the existence of importance of something real or significant." Or what about the noun "Heidegger", defined as: "A ponderous device for boring through thick layers of substance." That is followed by the following usage case: "It's buried so deep we'll have to use a heidegger." Or how about the verb "to Chisholm" which reads: "To make repeated small alterations in a definition or example." Or how about the very clever meaning of the noun "Strawson": "The descendant of a strawman, a position obscurely descended from a position never occupied." Even the primary author of the Lexicon cannot escape its barbs and arrows. The term "Dennett" when in verb form means "To while away the hours defining surnames." Few will understand all the jokes found here, but any philosophy graduate student or professor will get plenty of chuckles nonetheless.

January 2002 Winner: The Philosophical Gourmet Report by Brian Leiter has been a useful resource to prospective philosophy graduate students for years. Unlike Law or Business schools, Philosophy doesn't have any well-publicized national (or worldwide) rankings of graduate departments. The Leiter Report attempts to do this, but goes far beyond what is generally available from other such rankings. In his own words: "This Report tries to capture existing professional sentiment about quality at different programs and in different fields in the English-speaking world."

Not only does Brian provide his "overall ranking", he has always provided lists of departments that specialize in specific areas (over two dozen) including broad areas such as Epistemology or Political Philosophy, as well as some specific thinkers such as Kant or Wittgenstein. Schools can receive marks of Excellent, Good, or Notable in such areas, allowing students with well-defined interests to better find a good match. These results are provided both sorted by speciality and also clustered by department. He further distinguishes between two "approaches" to philosophy: "Problem Solving" and "Philosophically Informed History of Ideas". Additional rankings are provided for philosophy in MA programs and Law schools as well. Importantly, Brian provides information about the methods and criteria used to arrive at his numerous rankings (which is not without controversy).

As if all of this wasn't enough, he also provides an email update newsletter, helpful information on graduate and undergraduate study in general, and a section detailing recent, significant faculty appointments, movements, and retirements (reprinted in summary form in the The Philosophers Magazine).

Such a report naturally spurs argument and debate (e.g., About PGR). But what it attempts is a daunting task, and provides valuable information to philosophy students and faculty alike. It is provided in full on the Web by Blackwell Publishers.

November/December 2001 Winner: The Ism Book by Peter Saint-Andre has been a respected and popular reference on the web for many years. It is like other philosophy reference sources in that it provides dictionary-style entries on numerous important concepts from Philosophy. However, it is different in that it only covers the "Isms", that is, the words that end in "-ism", such as Behaviorism, Egoism, and Scholasticism. Perhaps surprisingly, this results in a highly useful reference, as in browsing the site one doesn't get bogged down by the little details and technicalities of the subject, which at times is not what you wants. The site has a simple structure, and provides several conceptual organization schemes to help you get "the big picture" of how these various terms relate to each other. Like any dictionary, you can of course browse it alphabetically. But Saint-Andre has also arranged the relevant entries into five primary branches of philosophy: Metaphysics, Epistemology, Ethics, Politics, and Aesthetics. Further, he has organized the isms into what he calls "types", including: Traditions, Movements, Schools, Doctrines, Principles, Ideas, Theories, Systems, and Approaches. Each of these branches and types is itself described on a terminology page, so that the reader can understand what common dimension the grouped concepts share. In addition, each entry is appropriately hyperlinked to related others, a must for any such reference tool. This resource is an excellent philosophy site, and I encourage you to check it out!

October 2001 Winner: David Chalmers' Philosophy of Mind Resources. David Chalmers is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Arizona and Associate Director of the Center for Consciousness Studies. He is one of the most well-known thinkers in the Philosophy of Mind today, with a strong focus on consciousness but a breadth that includes topics in artificial intelligence and computation, philosophical issues about meaning and possibility, the foundations of cognitive science and physics, and others. He has been a major force on the web since its earliest days, and of course his site includes many of his papers (some of which are quite accessible by the non-professional), responses to his works, and information on his books, such as The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory (1996). But what makes his web-work so valuable is the huge bibliographies he has compiled. His Philosophy of Mind bibliography includes over 5,000 entries in the following areas: Consciousness and Qualia, Mental Content, Metaphysics of Mind, Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence, Philosophy of Psychology, and Consciousness in the Sciences. He also provides a list over 1,000 links to online papers on consciousness, categorized into nearly 50 sub-topic areas. Another link directory provides the homepages of philosophers with online papers, sorted by their various areas of primary specialization. This last resource is a superb complement to EL's own database of Professor and Grad. Student homepages, as many on his list are not currently included therein, and vice-versa. And just when you think he is all business, he provides arguably the best list of philosophy humor links anywhere. The Philosophy of Mind is blessed with many great web resources, and Chalmer's work is certainly a gem.

September 2001 Winner: The Pragmatism Cybrary is a not-for-profit site for academic research about Pragmatism. This is a school of thought whose tradition is identified most commonly with philosophers such as John Dewey, William James, George Mead, C.S. Peirce, and more recent names such as Hilary Putnam and Richard Rorty. The Pragmatism Cybrary provides information on these philosophers and many more, often including detailed bibliographies. It also provides information on the various schools of pragmatism, a long bibliography of dissertations, centers and societies, conferences and other events, and a bibliography of recent books on pragmatism. It further details which PhD and MA programs have faculty who do work on pragmatism. The site is developed by John Shook, a philosophy professor from Oklahoma State University, who has authored many books and articles on pragmatism and related topics. He has created a comprehensive and easy to use resource for all kinds of information on pragmatism—a site well worth a look.

June/July/August 2001 Winner: I've decided to give a joint award for two websites that provide students with a wealth of information on logical fallacies. Stephen's Guide to Logical Fallacies, is created by Stephen Downes, an information architect at the University of Alberta and a former philosophy instructor. His site has been a valuable resource on the web since 1995. It not only provides an extensive index of logical fallacies, complete with definitions and examples, the site also incldues a bibliography of good logic textbooks and a discussion list. A much more recent creation is Gary Curtis's The Fallacy Files. This site also provides an in-depth look at all the major logical fallacies, and is indexed both alphabetically and by type. It includes an examples test, where readers can analyze recent media clippings to find the logical fallacy committed therein. Gary Curtis has a PhD in Philosophy from Indiana University and currently works as an ontologist for the artificial intelligence company. My advice to students: why not spend your rainy days this summer with these excellent web resources, so you can improve your critical thinking and writing skills for school this fall (and beyond)?!

May 2001 Winner: New Advent, created by Kevin Knight, has been a valuable resource on the Web for several years already. It is likely best well-known by EL users as the house of the online version of the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia. This resource provides interesting articles on numerous philosophical topics, including most major philosophers up until that time. Although the articles are obviously dated and written from a particular perspective (Catholicism), they are nonetheless an interesting read for exactly these two reasons. The site also provides a well-hyperlinked version of Thomas Aquinas's magnum opus Summa Theologica. Well over a hundred additional primary resources from early church fathers are also provided at New Advent, including dozens of works by Augustine. The site also provides a Catholic FAQ, various recent church documents, and a book section.

April 2001 Winner: The Dictionary of Islamic Philosophical Terms is an ongoing project of Muhammad Hozien. He describes it thus: "This dictionary is an aid to the readers of Muslim philosophical works many of which are in Arabic. It includes most of the terminology that was developed by Muslim philosophers in their works and the terms that they borrowed–and sometimes translated–from the Greek philosophical works. Also included are concepts that are Islamic but of a philosophical nature and were used by Muslim philosophers. Strictly Fiqhi and Sufi concepts are not necessarily included in this dictionary." The dictionary has a simple and easy to use design, and should be a valuable resource, particularly for those who know Arabic. Mr. Hozien has also provided a list of additional resources in Islamic Philosophy, including a bibliography, a chart showing its relation to other traditions, and several additional articles.

Fabruary/March 2001 Winner: The Oxford Companion to Philosophy (1995, OUP) is arguably the best single-volume philosophy reference available today. The good news is that Oxford University Press has teamed up with Xrefer.com to bring you the full text of this resource online! In print, this volume has 923 pages of articles from A-Z, Abelard to Zeno. While this makes it a must-have reference work in its own right, the online version provides additional benefits. First of all, having partnered with Xrefer.com, the contents of the OCP can be searched along with several dozen other great reference resources. Further, Xrefer's XML publishing system provides a very integrated approach to cross-references and links in the material. EL has already added several hundred links to the most substantial entries in the OCP, and I will be adding more in the coming weeks and months. A search box for Xrefer.com has also been added to various results pages at EL, and I encourage you to give their excellent service a test drive.

December 2000/January 2001 Winner: The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy is now available online. This resource, first published in print and CD-ROM formats in June 1998, provides the most current and high-quality reference information of its kind. REP Online features over 2000 original articles from over 1300 leading international experts across the discipline of philosophy. It also includes some 25,000 cross-reference links, additional links to external philosophy resources, and articles organised by theme, and philosophical traditions by region, religious traditions, and period. For now, only institutional subscriptions are available. The general public can access two dozen "signpost" articles that serve as primers and an introduction to REP Online. Routledge has stated it is exploring various pricing schemes for individuals to start sometime in 2001. When that happens, the REP Online's value will increase even more!

November 2000 Winner: PhilosophyPages.com
is the work of Garth Kemerling, professor of philosophy at Newberry College. Garth has had quality philosophy content on the web for a long time already — in fact, his "Dictionary of Philosophical Terms and Names" won the second ever EL "Gem of the Web" way back in December of 1997. His work is deserving of further recognition, however, in part because it goes way beyond his extensive dictionary. His web projects were recently collected under a new URL: PhilosophyPages.com. The dictionary still serves as a gateway that integrates all the content of his site, but this other content deserves mention: a survey of the history of western philosophy with a timeline listing all of the intellectual figures discussed in these pages; longer discussions of several key philosophers; a summary treatment of the elementary principles of Logic; and a generic study guide for prospective students of philosophy. Further, Garth's resources are a paradigm of good hypertext-linking. A must-see for students of philosophy, and a great resource for other instructors to utilize.

September/October 2000 Winner: Philosophy Now
is a print magazine for philosophy, available at news-stands. In addition to providing information about the magazine itself, their website also provides an event calendar that lists upcoming events in philosophy. Organization representatives can update the calendar themselves. They also provide ample discussion forums, where visitors can discuss both current and previous issues of the magazine, as well as philosophy topics in general. The discussion board is arranged so that posts are sorted by topics, which makes it easy to follow each discussion. A smattering of articles from past issues are also available on the website.

August 2000 Winner: Books in Philosophy is an online bookstore and reference service. Owned and operated by the Philosophy Documentation Center at Bowling Green State University, their website offers thousands of titles, including books, electronic texts on floppy disk or CD-ROM, videos, and audio cassettes from more than 130 publishers. Every title in the database is offered at a discount off the list price. Free searches of the database will provide you with information on titles relating to your particular field of philosophical interest. You can search the database by author, title, format, publisher, publication date, and ISBN. They are also adding subject classifications for each title, brief descriptions or author abstracts, and biographical information on authors and famous philosophers. Take a look!
PLEASE NOTE: This site is no longer in operation!

July 2000 Winner: D. Anthony Storm's Website on Kierkegaard
D. Anthony Storm works as a Web developer and his expertise shows in his attractive site on philosopher Soren Kierkegaard. Mr. Storm describes the site as "primarily devoted to developing an online commentary on the writings of the nineteenth century existentialist philosopher Søren Aabye Kierkegaard. Also provided are an introduction to Kierkegaard's method of authorship (including a secondary essay) and a Primer on Kierkegaardian Motifs, which serves as an introduction to his thought. Other resources include a brief biography of his life, a chronology, a bibliography, images, and links." This site has been around since 1995, so if you still haven't seen it I suggest you visit it right away!

June 2000 Winner: The Thomas Instituut te Utrecht is a co-operative group of theologians, philosophers and historians from several universities and institutes in the Netherlands, specialised in the study of the work of Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274). In addition to providing the latest news in Aquinas scholarly research, their website is an excellent source of information on Aquinas, his life and work. It provides ample bibliographic information, well-sorted into relevant keyword sections. They also have a database of Aquinas' works, searchable by title and category. A discussion f orum section lets visitors interact with Instituut scholars, to get answers on Aquinas scholarship issues. You can also find various books available from the Instituut on this website.

April/May 2000 Winner: Free-Market.Net should be your first stop for information on the free market, freedom, liberty, libertarianism, and classical liberalism. It maintains a database of more than 5,000 freedom-related news stories, policy analyses, books, e-texts, job openings, activist opportunities, events, and other resources. It is a great source of information on thinkers such as Ayn Rand, Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig Von Mises, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, Adam Smith, libertarians, classical liberals, objectivists, and more. Spotlight pages provide regularly updated links and news on hot-button issues. Additional FMN sites include ifeminists.com, Free-Market Environmentalists, and Libertarian.org.

March 2000 Winner: The Marxists Internet Archive "provides the most complete database of Marxism hitherto made. The Marxists Internet Archive (MIA) is made up of a variety of volunteers from all over the world — from Indonesia to Greece, Iran to the US, Germany to Brazil." The biggest attraction is the collection of texts by Marx, Engels, Lenin, and several dozen others. Non-English versions of many texts are also available. The reference section of the MIA contains a growing set of supplementary readings, with materials on figures as diverse as Hegel, Adam Smith, and Albert Einstein. The site also provides an Encyclopedia of Marxism, including glossaries on events, organizations, people, places, terms, and periodicals.

February 2000 Winner: The Secular Web is published by the Internet Infidels, an educational nonprofit organization of unpaid volunteers. An excellent source of freethought on the Internet, their site promotes metaphysical naturalism, the view that "our natural world is all that there is, a closed system in no need of an explanation and sufficient unto itself." They publish secular books, essays, papers, articles and reviews, and oppose the forces of superstition, especially the radical religious right. They encourage the avid pursuit of philosophy and the scientific enterprise, as evidenced by the 6,000 documents at their site and their willingness to link to the thoughtful views of those who disagree with their viewpoint.

January 2000 Winner: The Paideia Project On-Line is the post-conference Web site for the 20th World Congress of Philosophy held August 10-15, 1998 in Boston, Massachusetts. The largest gathering of academic philosophers ever, the Congress has produced both a 12-volume Printed Proceedings, and the online Paideia Archive. This online archive currently has nearly 700 papers sorted into 45 topics of philosophy. Although most papers are in English, many are in French, German, and Spanish. The archive is the largest on-line publishing effort in philosophy to date. I urge you to check it out!

December 1999 Winner: The Field Guide to the Philosophy of Mind, edited by Marco Nani and Massimo Marraffa, provides "guided tours" on various topics in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science. These essays provide "a preliminary state-of-the-art report on the issue, which explains what the question is, how it arises and what ramifications result from it; how the debate goes on with all the theories, objections, proposed solutions, etc." The site also has an growing bibliography of literature in the field.

November 1999 Winner: The Bertrand Russell Archives at McMaster University includes a wealth of information and resources on 20th century philosopher Bertrand Russell. A huge image gallery provides high-quality scans with descriptive annotations; information on "Russell: the Journal of the Bertrand Russell Archives" is provided; an online database of some 64,000 correspondence records is available for searching; a listing of forthcoming books in Russell studies; a Russell Quotations page; and information on the Russell Editorial Project, the Russell-L news and discussion forum, and much more. Links to additional Russell websites are also provided, making this an excellent first stop for Russell studies on the web.

September/October 1999 Winner: InteLex is a privately held company established in 1989. Their Past Masters series represents the largest collection of electronic texts in philosophy in the world. Databases are available on custom-made CD-ROM, via web subscription, and in SGML format for mounting on university servers. InteLex has also teamed up with the Philosophy Documentation Center to create "POIESIS: Philosophy Online Serials," which provides online access to a searchable database of a growing number of philosophy journals.

June/July/August 1999 Winner: The American Philosophical Association is the main professional organization for philosophers in the United States. Founded in 1900, its mission is to promote the exchange of ideas among philosophers, to encourage creative and scholarly activity in philosophy, to facilitate the professional work and teaching of philosophers, and to represent philosophy as a discipline. The APA web site includes information on conferences & calls for papers, grants & fellowships, philosophy web resources, texts of publications, APA Committee information, and (for the summer of 1999) FREE job listings.

May 1999 Winner: The Philosophy News Service provides easy access to philosophy news and announcements from around the world. It also provides a robust discussion forum. Note: The site was relaunched in the summer of 2004 after a long absence.

April 1999 Winner: The comparison of the intellectual voyages of discovery with that of the voyages by ship of the explorers which gives the site its name, brings into focus how important the changes in intellectual vision were during this period. The Great Voyages web site has a dual function: it supports a class in modern philosophy at Oregon State University, and it serves as a resource for those interested in the philosophy of the era. There are files on many philosphers of the era including a variety of women philosophers. There are also a variety of electronic texts of philosophical works from the period, study questions, research topics and other aids to students trying to write research papers in this area.

February/March 1999 Winner: Zeno's Coffeehouse is devoted to fun through mental exercise, and is brought to you by Ron Barnette of Valdosta State University. The site includes over 20 puzzles, each with attempted answers and discussion from website visitors. In Ron's own words: "Zeno of Elea, a pre-Socratic philosopher, was born about 490 B.C. His style of argument was to assume, provisionally, the position of the opponent, and then to derive impossible conclusions from it, thus establishing the absudity of the assumption. In the spirit of this Reductio Ad Absurdum dialectical approach to critical thinking, our Coffeehouse activities will tackle from time to time so-called 'common sense views,' analyzed critically. The mental gymnastics will be good exercise!"

January 1999 Winner: This website is "devoted to the Polish Philosophy of this Century and it aims to be an instrument to aid knowledge and diffusion of the philosophical ideas of the main Polish philosophers since 1900. Moreover, it hopes to be a meeting point for scholars all over the world in some way concerned with this matter. Cooperation to increase its information and news is open to scholars and scientists all over the world interested in these topics."

November/December 1998 Winner: The Dictionary of Philosophy of Mind is sponsored by the Philosophy- Neuroscience-Psychology program of Washington University in St. Louis. It is intended as a free resource to all those interested in the philosophy of mind. We have over 150 entries, including more than 50 biographies of your favorite philosophers. All contributions are carefully reviewed for quality and content. Each entry has a two to three line summary and many have lengthy discussions. Check it out!

October 1998 Winner: The Ethics Connection, the Web site of the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University, features more than 1,000 pages of information with focus areas in ethics and health care, education, technology, business, and public policy. The Center's award-winning magazine, Issues in Ethics, is posted as are extensive links and case studies on which browsers may comment. Check it out!

September 1998 Winner: The Philosophers' Web Magazine is brought to you by Dr. Jeremy Stangroom and Dr. Julian Baggini. The electronic complement to the Philosophers Magazine, this website includes archived articles, features, and book reviews from the current issue and all previous issues of this outstanding publication. The site further includes a discussion board, a valuable events calendar, and several other features. Check it out!

August 1998 Winner: Aesthetics Online is the official web site of the American Society for Aesthetics. This website, edited by Dominic Lopes, includes articles about aesthetics, philosophy of art, art theory and art criticism, as well as information about aesthetics events worldwide, and links to other aesthetics-related resources on the internet such as aesthetics bibliographies and the Aesthetics-L email discussion list. It is an extremely valuable resource for anyone interested in the field.

July 1998 Winner: The 4th Tetralogy: Exploring Plato's Middle Dialogues examines with great care four of Plato's texts, namely The Republic, The Phaedrus, The Symposium, and The Phaedo. It is a Virtual Learning Environment created by Anthony F. Beavers, Christopher Planeaux and Bernard Suzanne. As Beavers, the general editor of the project, writes: "The purpose of this site is not to argue for a particular thesis, but to provide a rich hypertextual environment in which students and scholars may explore four of Plato's dialogues in their historical and philosophical contexts."

June 1998 winner: The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy was designed by its editor, Edward N. Zalta, who is a Consulting Associate Professor in the Stanford Philosophy Department. The dynamic principles upon which the Encyclopedia is based were described in the paper "A Solution to the Problem of Updating Encyclopedias" (coauthor: Eric Hammer), which appeared in Computers and the Humanities 31/1 (1997): 47-60.

April/May 1998 winner: The Internet Classics Archive is an award- winning, searchable collection of 440 classical Greek and Latin texts, as well as select Chinese, Persian, and other classical works (all in English translation) by 50 different authors, with user- provided commentary and trivia sections.

February/March 1998 winner: Center for Bioethics "Bioethics Internet Project" at the University of Pennsylvania. It is a truly outstanding site. It has a great collection of material and links on both concrete issues (e.g., cloning) and general subjects (e.g., Bioethics and the Law).

January 1998 winner: Ethics Updates is edited by Lawrence Hinman. It provides a broad range of resources on both ethical theory and applied ethics. Check it out!

December 1997 winner: Garth Kemerling, philosophy professor at Newberry College. His valuable internet resource "A Dictionary of Philosophical Terms and Names" has been awarded the second ever Episteme Links "Gem of the Web" award.

November 1997 winner: Jim Fieser, philosophy professor at the University of Tennessee at Martin. His valuable internet resource, "The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy", has been awarded the first ever Episteme Links "Gem of the Web" award.