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Do you have examples? I am studying philosophy and most people in the department consider it a good resource even when the author of a particular article disagr
by glomph 11y ago
Do you have examples? I am studying philosophy and most people in the department consider it a good resource even when the author of a particular article disagrees with them (in their other published work).
- jkot 11y agoThere are no entries for 'embarrassing' subjects such as Marxism or Leninism... But entry about Colonialism has huge propaganda from Lenin, while not much about positive impact of colonialism.
- njharman 11y agoSo "biased" in the sense that it is not biased towards your world view.
- jkot 11y agoNo, it totally ignores my world view. Marxism-Leninism was the biggest event in philosophy, since Aristotle and I think it deserves at least small chapter in "authoritative" encyclopedia :-)
- skissane 11y agoI did a search on "Marxism". Got 79 articles back. I don't think it can fairly be accused of ignoring Marxism.
- Maken 11y agoThat's because they is a good number of articles that mention "Marxism" as a philosophy, yet it doesn't have it's own article.
- yarou 11y agoI'd argue that Marxism is tangential to philosophy proper. It has more to do with political economy than dialectical materialism. If you want that, you should read Hegel.
- kijin 11y agoThere's a big article on the man himself, and it's written by someone whom I know to be have a fair amount of expertise in related topics. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/marx/ http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/marx/ It seems that SEP's policy is to have articles on either people or topics, but not topics named after people.
- teddyh 11y agoIf that’s the case, it assumes that the topic named after a person can be learned by learning about the person. However, this is not true in many cases where the topic arose later than the person itself (like, for instance, Christianity), or where the person explicitly disclaimed the topic from having anything to do with themselves (Marx himself famously said that he was not a Marxist).
- kijin 11y agoIn cases like that, it is often much more helpful to discuss the actual substance(s) of the topic(s), such as equality, property ownership, markets, exploitation, and philosophy of history (all of which have separate articles in SEP) than to try to dissect the incredibly broad, vague, and diverse set of ideologies that "Marxism" is. SEP has articles on a number of other people who took Marxism and ran with it in different directions, such as Georg Lukács, Herbert Marcuse, and Jacques Derrida, as well as critical theory as a whole. It also has a bunch of other articles on strands of feminism that were deeply influenced by Marx. It is the mark of an important thinker that he shows up all over the place in all sorts of topics. Whatever you think Marxism is about, I'm pretty sure you can learn about it on SEP. But you can't do that by reading a single article, any more than you can learn a major web framework by reading a single file. But I do admit that SEP would benefit from more hyperlinks to make related articles more discoverable.
- glomph 11y agoThe policy is actually to have articles on issues in philosophy (rather than the philosophies of particular people) with exceptions for historical articles about peoples lives. The article on Marx is such an exception and the lack of an article on marxism is a result of the policy.
- AnimalMuppet 11y agoNo, biased in the sense that it's biased. jkot lists two examples, which are in fact biased in opposite directions. (That might make the overall encyclopedia unbiased, but the articles are still biased.)
- samth 11y agoThere is, however, a long article about Marx, and articles about other Marxists. So I don't think your complaint about "embarrassing" subjects is accurate.
- glomph 11y agoThe lack of articles on Marxism and Leninism is the result of an editorial policy not an unconsious bias. http://plato.stanford.edu/guidelines.html http://plato.stanford.edu/guidelines.html Articles are supposed to be on issues rather than people with exceptions for historical articles. The article on colonialism looks pretty good to me, with relativily broad coverage and citations, but it isn't my area of intrest and I don't really have time to read it properly.