29 April 2006

Work in Progress

This is something odd I noticed about S. Marc Cohen's entry on "Aristotle's Metaphysics" in SEP.

The entry amounts to about 12 pages on my screen. Of these, 2 pages are introductory. 9 concern book Z. One page deals with material elsewhere in the Metaphysics. There is no discussion of Lambda.

How is this a suitable encyclopaedia entry on this topic? On his homepage Cohen describes the entry as 'a nearly complete draft'. But since when does SEP publish drafts? (I see nothing in the SEP editorial policy acknowledging that it publishes drafts.) And if some of its entries are 'drafts', shouldn't these be identified as such?

True, SEP is a self-described 'dynamic reference source'. But shouldn't that mean that finished drafts will be revised as called for, not that drafts get posted as if they were finished?

0 comments: