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Noesis: Philosophical Research Online

© Frederic Giacobazzi

Readers of this page may recall an article recommending the useful Hippias search engine, a mechanism for conducting field-wide searches for philosophy resources on the Internet. Philosophy teachers, researchers and students wishing to conduct systematic and productive online searches for philosophy-related materials will also be advised to include in their arsenals another fine index and search tool housed--like Hippias--at the University of Evansville: Noesis: Philosophical Research On-Line.

Noesis, co-edited by Anthony F. Beavers and Peter Suber of the University of Evansville, bills itself as "an index and search engine of philosophical content written by professional philosophers." The resources of Noesis emphasize the work of credentialed scholars, comprising indexes, essays, lectures and other course materials, images, graphs, charts, book and article reviews, primary texts, bibliographies, chronologies, and glossaries. Still in Beta release (version 2.0), the Noesis site takes a narrower, filtered approach to indexing its resources. Its topic index is "built by a team of qualified editors who hand-select resources from the larger dataset." Items are excluded from the dataset unless they were "written or edited by a professional or some other qualified person." According to Beavers, "For essays and lectures we are particularly careful to make sure that the authors carry a Ph.D. or equivalent degree in philosophy or a related discipline, except in a few cases where the excellent work of graduate students has been included."

The result for users of such pre-screening is a list of targeted search results which, while more limited, can be more substantive and more authoritative. According to Beavers, "quality control" is the Noesis watchword, the mission of the site being to become "an encyclopedic library of philosophy written and accredited by professional philosophers."

Noesis currently indexes 8,500 philosophical resources--the works of 1,660 authors--in six categories: essays, lectures, images, reviews, primary texts and research tools. Both specialists and beginners will find Noesis useful. As Beavers puts it, "The category of 'essays' is reserved for discursive resources pitched to professional philosophers or those with a more advanced philosophical background, while 'lectures' is reserved for items that are particularly suited to undergraduate philosophers or beginners. . .This division means that professional philosophers can filter out introductory content, or beginners can search only introductory content." A further useful mechanism of the site is the tracking of scholarly dialogue by linking to responses to particular resources. Where responses to an item are available, the word "responses" appears in the item's description. Clicking on the word provides the user with a hyperlinked list of files that respond to the original.