Where to find metaphysical information?
March 28, 2007 5:12 PM   Subscribe

What's the best online repository for metaphysical information?
posted by jitterbug perfume to Religion & Philosophy (8 answers total) 8 users marked this as a favorite
 
Best answer: I'm not sure what kind of information you're looking for, but one candidate is Sacred Texts. A library of resources for all different religions, including the Bible, I Ching, Nostradamus, and many notable philosophical writings.
posted by lostburner at 5:34 PM on March 28, 2007 [1 favorite]


Do you mean metaphysics in the philosophy sense (loosely defined as theories of reality), or in the New Age woo-woo religion-lite sense?
posted by matildaben at 5:42 PM on March 28, 2007


Response by poster: I mean metaphysics in any sense... but mostly the former.
posted by jitterbug perfume at 5:53 PM on March 28, 2007


The wikipedia article has links to several online resources. I generally look at the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Metaphysics is such a broad topic that you'll probably get better information if you narrow your search a bit.
posted by demiurge at 6:48 PM on March 28, 2007


This forum might lead you in the right direction, though it might fall into the latter.
posted by c:\awesome at 6:55 PM on March 28, 2007


For the professional academic philosophy sense, try the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (excellent info, maybe a bit arcane if you're trying to start from nothing), try googling for syllabi for "introduction to metaphysics" type university courses (typical topics: mind and body, free will, existence of God, personal identity, paradoxes of material constitution, causation, possibility and necessity). There are a couple of good "ask a philosopher" websites where you can ask specific questions (and search past answers to specific questions). Googlein "ask a philosopher" and "ask philosophers" and you'll get these. Also there are a number of previous mefi threads about various philosophical topics (eg free will) if you search around.
posted by LobsterMitten at 10:35 PM on March 28, 2007


Well, I can help lead you to some of the more current papers in metaphysics by professional philosophers. These might be overly technical, but they can be fun to browse through to get a sense of what's being done.

JSTOR and other journal repositories will let you read philosophy journals online. You'll need to be affiliated with a participating library or university to get access, though. Nous, The Philosophical Review, and Mind are a few of the biggies.

If you don't have JSTOR access, or want to read papers even before they hit the journals, then you should check out Online Papers in Philosophy. This site trawls the web pages of professional philsophers to see if any have put new papers on their web sites. If you click on the Pages Tracked link in the sidebar, you'll get a huge list of links to the webpages of philosophers who keep their papers online. Some professors keep their course notes or other resources online, and these can be very helpful. For example, see Ted Sider's page. I'm rather taken with Peter Suber's course notes page as well.

Finally, if you're interested in consciousness, David Chalmers has a huge list of online papers on consciousness broken down by category.
posted by painquale at 10:44 PM on March 28, 2007




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