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The idea came to Jim Fieser late one night in the fall of 1995. The World Wide Web was just 4 years old then, primitive compared to what users experience online today. But the UT Martin professor sensed that it already had the potential to change the world.
Not long after settling onto campus, Fieser befriended Bob Bradley, then an IT staff member (currently department head for computer science), and Chris Caldwell, a math professor since retired. They became known as “The Three Amigos,” early internet enthusiasts who’d tinker day and night on the clunky machines in the campus computer center.
Bradley taught his new friends to code HTML, and before long, Fieser, a preeminent scholar of the work of Scottish thinker David Hume, launched his first project, the Hume Archive, a website featuring e-texts by and about the philosopher. His second online project was an advice column written in the voice of a cranky philosopher with existentially depressing responses to common questions; he called it “Ask Mr. Angst.”
“But I wanted to do something more serious in the discipline,” Fieser says.
From 1967 through the fall of 1995, a single encyclopedia of philosophy existed in print. Fieser thumbed through it in his office, wondering when someone would figure out how to take it online and, better yet, make it free to scholars and students. A year earlier, Bradley had launched UT Martin’s website with the help of Caldwell and Fieser.
Not long afterward, the philosophy professor began scanning his lecture notes and scholarly articles from older public-domain philosophy books for a similarly comprehensive project. His third website would simply be called The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (IEP).
“I started with a dozen articles, then 50,” Fieser says. He left his email at the bottom of each page. “Back then, when content of that kind on the web was nonexistent, people found it. Philosophy professors from other colleges and universities started writing to encourage me. Some asked how they could help.”
At the same time he launched the IEP, Stanford University created its own version backed by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and National Science Foundation. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy was smaller than Fieser’s IEP. Still, it made him briefly question the sense behind his one-person project at Martin, with only a fraction of the student body, faculty and clout as the California school. He plowed forward.
“Scholars never consult just a single source for their research,” Fieser says. “Even if there are two encyclopedias of philosophy, articles with the same title will still offer different information, even different perspectives.”
Before launching the IEP, Fieser created the Hume Archive, a website featuring e-texts by and about Scottish philosopher David Hume, as well as an online advice column called “Ask Mr. Angst,” in which a cranky philosopher responded to everyday questions with existentially depressing answers.
The IEP consists of 900 articles written by 400 subject-matter experts worldwide. The longest article is 35,000 words. Its subject is Thomas Aquinas, and the author is UT Martin philosophy professor Christopher Brown.
More than 7 million users from around the world visited the IEP in the past 12 months.
Visitors come from more than 200 countries—virtually every country globally.
Besides the United States, the countries where the IEP is most popular are India, the Philippines, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, Indonesia, Nigeria, China, South Africa, Pakistan, Germany, Brazil, New Zealand and Malaysia.
Aristotle, Socrates, Immanuel Kant, Plato, John Locke and Thomas Hobbes are the most searched-for philosophers on the site.
The site’s most popular philosophical topics are social contract theory, logical fallacies, literary theory, utilitarianism, epistemology, political philosophy and virtue ethics.
By 1997, Fieser fashioned the IEP to mirror any journal or academic textbook of the time with calls for submissions and a stringent peer-review system for articles. Bradley Dowden, a professor at Sacramento State University and early contributor, was promoted to co-editor. He oversaw submissions related to analytical philosophy, language and logic, while Fieser edited what he calls the softer side of philosophy: ethics, aesthetics, political and religious philosophy.
Dozens of Ph.D.s from across the world were recruited as subject-area experts and editors. Today, more than 30 editors oversee submissions on topics as geographically far-ranging as African, American, Chinese, European, Indian, Indigenous and Islamic philosophies, as well as the philosophies of art, law, mathematics, science and other popular areas such as epistemology, ethics, logic and metaphysics.
UT Martin’s other full-time philosophy faculty members, Christopher Brown and Matthew Braddock, also are area editors. Brown specializes in medieval philosophy, and Braddock specializes in the philosophy of religion.
No one involved with the IEP from Fieser down receives compensation for their work. Fieser has never applied for a grant, taken private funding or written a marketing plan. The website, which does not advertise, draws in the largest number of users of any hosted by UT Martin’s IT center. In July 2024, more than 7 million visitors from 200-plus countries accessed the IEP.
“Right from the start, our goal was to write high-quality academic material that everyone from scholars to undergraduates would find beneficial and connected to the content they’re familiar with,” Fieser says. “We wanted free, quick access long before the concept of open-source publishing. The fewer obstacles, the better.”
Today, there are more than 900 articles on the IEP, the longest of which is 35,000 words, though the average is between 8,000 and 12,000. Each opens with a summary intended to be compelling, substantive and representative of articles that are thick with scholarly language borne from intensive research by each author. Try Googling any philosophical topic, and an article from the IEP will pop up on the first page of query returns.
“Our appeal to our authors is fame, not fortune,” Fieser says, laughing. As just one of a three-person department at Martin, where he’s responsible for molding young minds more than he is doing scholarly work, he wouldn’t consider himself famous by any stretch.
“I think I’m pretty normal for the level of training and expertise of professors at schools this size, where our heavy teaching load prevents us from spending our whole lives publishing. If we could do this here at Martin, no small university has an excuse for why they couldn’t do the same.”
At this very moment, thousands worldwide are finding their way to the IEP, searching for articles about Aristotle, John Locke, social contract theory or virtue ethics—among its most searched-for philosophers and topics. In his mid-60s now, Fieser shows no sign of slowing down his efforts to bring the world of philosophy online; on the IEP’s “Desired Articles” page, there are more than 100 thinkers and subjects he and Dowden have listed they’d like experts to write about.
“At this point, I’ve already accomplished well beyond what I set out to do,” Fieser says. “I wouldn’t mind if my name were taken off the IEP and the whole story of how it came about completely disappeared from the record. Because the rewards are far more than a historical legacy to me. It is the dedication and involvement of our authors and being able to reach so many people around the world from right here in Martin.”
