[Marcel Odenbach, “You Can’t See the Forest for the Trees”]
The encyclopedia is sponsored by the Protestant Institute for Interdisciplinary Research (FEST) in Heidelberg. FEST’s mission emphasizes “sustainable development [and] religion and culture,” and “dialogue between theology and the social sciences, as well as studies on ecology in the broadest sense of the word.” The basic funding for FEST is provided by the Evangelical Church in Germany (which recently named as its new chair a 25 year old former philosophy student).
Online Encyclopedia Philosophy of Nature (OEPN) is edited by Thomas Kirchhoff (Protestant Institute for Interdisciplinary Research / Ulm University) along with an editorial team.
The encyclopedia is in its early stages, with entries on around 18 topics so far, including atmosphere, chaos, environmental ethics, measurement, naturalness, pantheism, person, and others. For each topic, there is a brief summary and a link to a PDF of the full entry.
A new peer-reviewed open-access philosophy resource aims to “provide high-quality information on, and explanations of, natural-philosophical terms and subject areas and to make these freely accessible… in German and English.”
