EpistemeLinks.com Update Newsletter, v.6, #5, 9/10/2002
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I hope those of you who are back to school as students or instructors are
off to a good start!
This is a very important Update! After spending a lot of time this summer,
I am pleased to announce that I have totally upgraded the entire site to a new
code platform. The entire site's programming code has been rewritten from
ASP/VBScript to the new ASP.NET/C# platform. In addition to far easier
maintenance for me, this upgrade has led to several immediate improvements to
the site, and will allow for many more in the weeks and months ahead. Some of
these are features that I thought of adding several years ago, but would have
been difficult to implement at the time...but they are finally here. Read on and
check out the upgraded site!
As always, the latest links added to the ELC database can be found at the
What's New? page:
Newsletter Headlines:
** ELC Upgrades to ASP.NET Code Platform **
** New Encyclopedia Entries Section **
** New Philosopher and Topic Header Feature **
** Guestbook Feature Removed and Archived **
** Latest ELC "Gems of the Web" Winners **
** New Entries at the SEP **
** Upcoming Events in Philosophy (September/October) **
Details for each item follow below.
** ELC Upgrades to ASP.NET Code Platform **
Without going into much technical detail and jargon, I did want to make a
few general comments about this upgrade. Overall, the site should look very
similar, but you will find some design changes have been made. The homepage no
longer has the table with gray boxes for the main section links, providing
instead a better organized selection of such links. The homepage and most pages
in the site now have green and white sidebar areas, instead of the yellow
sidebar. These sidebars have also been better organized, matching the structure
from the homepage. Many of the results pages will look the same as before, but
some now format the results in a more colorful table. Many also have the ability
to *sort the results* by clicking on various column headings (e.g., Profs/Grads
Homepages, Electronic Texts, Audio Books, and others). The Calendars on the site
are more attractive as well, and there are numerous other small enhancements.
The last thing I'll mention concerns the page extensions throughout the site:
almost all of them are now .aspx instead of .asp. This means that if you linked
to specific pages, you'll want to update your links. For the old homepage as
well as all main section pages, I'll have redirects in place soon -- but for
some other pages I will not.
** New Encyclopedia Entries Section **
One of the new features that launches along with the site upgrade is an
Encyclopedia Entries links section. In the past, Encyclopedia and other
reference links were included in a sidebar for the primary philosopher and topic
result pages. After a while, some of these sidebars became quite long -- far
longer than the main content of the page in some cases. So I have created an
entire main section for Encyclopedia entries. Included in this section at this
time are links to articles from the following sources: Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy, Oxford Companion to Philosophy, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy,
Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Encyclopedia Britannica, Encarta,
Encyclopedia of the Renaissance, Thoemmes Encyclopedia of the History of Ideas,
and The Catholic Encyclopedia (1913). Further, you can now view these articles
sorted by either Title or Source Name (titles that are people's names are first
name first).
** New Philosopher and Topic Header Feature **
Another new feature made possible by the upgrade is the display of a
standard header section for all philosopher and topic result pages. So for
example, the primary Aristotle page, as well as the Aristotle pages under
e-Texts, Encyclopedia articles, and any other area, will all have the same
beginning information. For philosophers, this information will include the
person's name, their birthday and date of death (if available), a randomly
rotating quotation (if available), and a sidebar box with links to other areas
of ELC that have links for this philosopher. For topics this information will
include the topic title, a randomly rotating quotation (if available), the same
sidebar box but including a link to related philosophers (where available), and
also a brief description of the topic. For now, such descriptions only exist for
the six "periods" of philosophy at ELC, but eventually I will have written them
for all the topic areas, summarizing the key questions in each topic, and
linking to some of the key philosophers who have tackled them. I also intend to
write brief summaries for each philosopher eventually as well, but that will
take time. Please note that the quotations will randomly rotate if there is more
than one available for the given philosopher/topic.
** Guestbook Feature Removed and Archived **
Many websites in the early days of the web provided guestbooks as an
interactive feature. Such pages usually consisted of a simple web form where
visitors could "sign-in" and provide a comment. The ELC guestbook was exactly
this sort of feature, and was available from August 1997 until August 2002. At
that time, it became clear that it had outlived its usefullness, and had become
a relic of a bygone era. Because many visitors were not following the rules for
posting entries to the guestbook, I was removing/editing 10 entries for every 1
valid one. For this reason, and because guestbooks are no longer a particularly
valuable aspect of a thriving, dynamic website, I decided to close the guestbook
in mid-2002. The archive of past entries is still available.
** Latest ELC "Gems of the Web" Winners **
Each month (usually) EpistemeLinks.com gives a "Gem of the Web" award to an
outstanding philosophy resource site. The most recent winner is:
MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive
** New Entries at the SEP **
I like to draw attention to the latest entries at the Stanford Encyclopedia
of Philosophy, because it provides such well-written articles. Since my last
newsletter, the SEP has added 14 more articles, listed below. These articles are
all linked from their What's New page at
http://plato.stanford.edu/new.html. (Authors are given in
parentheses)
Paul-Henri Dietrich (Baron) d'Holbach (Michael LeBuffe)
Libertarianism (Peter Vallentyne)
Fuzzy Logic (Petr Hajek)
Qualia: The Knowledge Argument (Martine Nida-Rümelin)
Personal Identity (Eric T. Olson)
Egalitarianism (Richard Arneson)
William of Ockham (Paul Vincent Spade)
Timon of Phlius (Richard Bett)
Homosexuality (Brent Pickett)
Pyrrho (Richard Bett)
Identity Politics (Cressida Heyes)
Naturalism in Legal Philosophy (Brian Leiter)
Set Theory (Thomas Jech)
Realism (Alexander Miller)
** Upcoming Events in Philosophy (September/October) **
T. H. Green and Contemporary Philosophy
9/2/2002 - 9/4/2002
Sixth Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue
9/4/2002 - 9/6/2002
Digital Resources for the Humanities
9/8/2002 - 9/11/2002
Visual Representations and Interpretations
9/9/2002 - 9/12/2002
Prague International Colloquium Formal Epistemology
9/10/2002 - 9/13/2002
Annual Conference of the Society for European Philosophy
9/11/2002 - 9/14/2002
International Conference on Music and Artificial Intelligence
9/12/2002 - 9/15/2002
Science and Beliefs: From Natural History to Natural Science
(1700-1900)
9/12/2002 - 9/13/2002
The Royal Institute of Philosophy Conference
9/13/2002 - 9/15/2002
British Society of Aesthetics
9/13/2002 - 9/15/2002
Hume Studies in Britain II
9/18/2002 - 9/19/2002
Nietzsche and the Classical Tradition
9/20/2002 - 9/22/2002
Social and Political Thought Graduate Conference
9/20/2002 - 9/20/2002
Ethics in Contemporary Life
9/27/2002 - 9/28/2002
4th Annual MSU Graduate Student Philosophy Conference
9/27/2002 - 9/28/2002
Philosophical Insights into Logic and Mathematics
9/30/2002 - 10/4/2002
Rational Animals
10/3/2002 - 10/4/2002
South Central Seminar in the History of Early Modern Philosophy
10/4/2002 - 10/5/2002
Philosophy and Neuroscience
10/17/2002 - 10/20/2002
2002 Alyce Vrolyk Conference on Bioethics
10/18/2002 - 10/18/2002
Humanities and Technology Association Conference
10/24/2002 - 10/26/2002
Society for Utopian Studies
10/24/2002 - 10/27/2002
Perspectives on Mathematical Practices
10/24/2002 - 10/26/2002
Workshop on Context 2002: Semantics vs. Pragmatics
10/25/2002 - 10/26/2002
54th Annual Northwest Philosophy Conference
Start Date: 10/25/2002 - 10/26/2002
Annual Meeting of the Canadian Jacques Maritain Association
Start Date: 10/25/2002 - 10/26/2002
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Best,
Tom Stone, EpistemeLinks.com