The following appeared in Volume 98, Number 1 (Fall, 1998) of the APA Newsletters

Though it does not openly declare itself, it is clear that this set of pages was developed by its author as an aid for teaching his own survey courses in the history of Western philosophy. It includes a Dictionary of Philosophical Terms and Names (with hundreds of entries), a sketch of the history of Western philosophy (still in progress, but more or less complete up to the 19th century), a timeline of Western philosophers with brief discussions of important philosophers and links to related resources, a short discussion of elementary logic (as the author admits, this basically follows the main points in Copi), an edifying Study Guide for first-time students of philosophy, and a fairly complete (but not always up-to date) page of helpful links to other general philosophy resources on the Web. All of this is aimed squarely at undergraduate students, indeed beginners, rather than at teachers of philosophy. In fact the link to "some examples of the use of these materials in undergraduate Philosophy Courses" just displays the catalog of philosophy and religion courses at the author’s institution. Nevertheless the author declares that he welcomes fair use of his copyrighted material by others - and provides useful up-front links to discussions of the concepts of fair use and copyright.

I do see some problems with recommending this site to undergraduates, however. The Dictionary, though admirably extensive for a personal website, is, as needs be, spotty - fortunately, links are provided to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and to the Hippias philosophy search engine. There are numerous bothersome errors that will lead students astray: just to cite one glaring example, Love and Strife in Empedocles should be given as philia and neikos, not Erôs and Arês! Another example: the Greek title of Porphyry’s work On Images is Peri agalmatôn, and not what is given here (and it is certainly not his most important extant work apart from his Aristotle-commentaries - what about On Abstinence, for instance, not to mention Against the Christians!) The practice of displaying Greek words in a mathematician’s font without accents or breathings is irritating to cognoscenti and certainly should not be encouraged for students: one should rather stick with a standard Roman transliteration. More importantly, while the author’s sketch of the history of modern philosophy and later is quite competent, though very brief, there are gaps and infelicities in the earlier history: important and influential figures such as Carneades and Iamblichus get no mention, and everything from Aristotle to the Arabs gets treated under the single rubric ‘Hellenistic Philosophy’, which strictly only applies to the pre-imperial period (through Cicero). Similar complaints could be made about the too-brief treatment of medieval philosophy - Peter Lombard shouldn’t be referred to as "Lombard", for instance - which as is usual overemphasizes the importance of the so-called problem of universals above all other issues. A sign of the incompleteness of the historical sketch is that one cannot always step through its parts from page to page, having instead to go back to the table of contents: hopefully, such links will be added later. The choice of ‘Assembled Philosophers’, who are singled out for more extended treatment, seems somewhat odd: Epictetus but not Plotinus or Duns Scotus, Catherine MacKinnon (!) and de Beauvoir but not Derrida or Foucault. But probably this section represents work in progress as well, and the figures discussed here will be those who have received special emphasis in Kemerling’s courses.

All references are in the form of links to other posted material: there is no mention of printed secondary works on the history of philosophy. This might be salutary in getting students to focus on the primary sources, but it also suggests a certain complacency about the (inevitably) superficial level of interpretation offered in the history and brief summaries. Students need constantly to be reminded that any superficial understanding of a great, or even good, philosophical mind can never be an adequate one.