Taking up again the tradition of the Friesian School, this is a non-peer-reviewed electronic journal and archive of philosophy, inaugurated on line July 6, 1996, four years before the end of the 20th Century, just as the brilliant, courageous, prolific, and little appreciated German philosopher Leonard Nelson (1882-1927) started his Abhandlungen der Fries'schen Schule, Neue Folge, attempting a "Reformation of Philosophy," four years after the beginning of the 20th Century.

The essays at this site, addressing many philosophical, historical, scientific, religious, economic, legal, and political issues, range from the fully annotated and technical to more informal and discursive discussions, often originally written for undergraduate classes. Many items therefore should be intelligible to those not familiar with all the arcana of academic philosophy, or with academic philosophy at all. This is done deliberately, since the trend, by which philosophy has obscured and esotericized itself and mostly dropped out of popular and literate culture, should be resisted. Work of a similar range, with the appropriate philosophical orientation and grounding, is acceptable and desired.

Submissions will be considered that relate to the persons, issues, and history illustrated in the following statements, biographical sketches, and editorial essays. Treatments of issues that do not involve the Friesians or other philosophers mentioned below directly are sought if they parallel or supplement Kantian or Friesian doctrine, from metaphysics to political economy, or throw light on the history of philosophy in ways at least consistent with Friesian principles. Exemplary and supplementary works from recent philosophy may be found under Reviews. Contributions that do address the Friesians, etc., need not conform to the direction of interpretation that is editorially preferred.

Although now with several contributed works, the number of submissions to the journal remains thin, often inappropriate, and all but never from academic philosophers or graduate students. The website thus may seem largely like the personal project of the editor. That will remain the case as long as interest in the Friesian School is minimal, as it is now (at least outside of Germany), and as long as the tendency of contemporary philosophy is to illiberal and irrationalist nihilism, as detailed below. It must fall upon someone to maintain the tradition, however long it takes until interest will sustain itself. Much of the content of the site, which has accumulated more than 60 megabytes of material, including graphics, is therefore editorial.

The Proceedings of the Friesian School, Fourth Series, employing the new medium of the World Wide Web, already linked from numerous sites and indices around the world, receiving up to 1,306,873 hits and 95,006 page views from 49,487 unique users a week, rather than becoming another dusty, obscure presence on library shelves, avoids the costs and complications of publishing, binding, mailing, and subscriptions, and establishes a Friesian presence in a way that is immediately accessible to potentially every computer on earth, from California to Australia, Taiwan, Korea, China, Greece, Romania, Germany, Sweden, Italy, Iceland, Brazil, Croatia, Iran, Pakistan, South Africa, and more, an opportunity for the curious, for those concerned with the sterility, obscurantism, and tendentiousness of recent philosophy, and for those dedicated to Leonard Nelson's own project of Socratic Philosophy.