About This Site

Philosophical Society.com is a website of ideas whose aim is to stimulate reflection on contemporary life. For over two decades, it has published excerpts from the work of philosophers, psychologists, scientists, novelists, essayists, and theorists.

The website resists easy classification, as it is neither an academic journal nor an encyclopedia, neither a magazine nor a blog. The void it has always sought to fill is the one left by the disappearance of the generalist intellectual, of an intelligence concerned with universal themes and the eternal. An intelligence, one might say, that is pre-postmodern, a stranger to academic specialization and to the professionalization of knowledge.

The website was among the first to publish excerpts from relatively unknown philosophical works, including those from Kierkegaard’s “That Individual”: Two Notes Concerning My Work as an Author; Nietzsche’s Schopenhauer As Educator; Russell’s Free Man’s Worship; and Santayana’s Egotism In German Philosophy. It was the first to publish Seneca's On the Shortness of Life and Jung's Stages of Life.

The Bon Mot collection of quotes, Reference Library, and Excerpts & Passages are among the original contributions of the site.

Philosophical Society.com has availed the research efforts of authors, teachers, students, and scholars all around the world, across many disciplines. Its articles have turned up on the course syllabi of many leading institutions of higher learning.

In 2009 Philosophical Society.com made Wired Magazine’s “Hottest Web Links” chart. In 2012 it was included on Cambridge University’s “Ideas for Wider Reading” list. In 2014 it was referenced in the Encyclopedia of Critical Psychology, and the following year was cited in Addressing Loneliness, an academic text that is part of Routledge’s “Researching Social Psychology” series.

To learn more, see the Distinctions page.

The articles of this website are protected by copyright. Any commercial use of them without express permission is strictly forbidden.

*Philosophical Society.com is not affiliated with any association or institution.