How to Manage a Profile

Profiles are our portal's main mechanism for interaction with its users. They permit users to offer information about themselves, post articles, create pages, announce events and to post comments. They come with a user-ID, a unique "login"- or username and a personalised, automatically generated password, communicated to you if there is at least one email address registered in the profile information.

Usernames are determined by us with the help of our extensive bibliography , are unique and correspond to the "stems" of our bibliography keys. For "Philipp Blum", for ex., this gives not "blum" (as there are many of these), nor "blum_p" (as there is also a "Patrick Blum" in the bibliography), but "blum_ph", for bibliography keys "blum_ph:2024", "blum_ph:2024a" etc.

That we call bibliography items "profiles" does not mean that we are secretly hording information about you, as the FBI would. We do not. Unless you choose to change this, your profile just consists of a clickable database entry, displaying your full name and its abbreviation for the bibliography keys. Even if we (believe to) have an email address for you, it will only appear in your profile if you have posted at least one article on the portal. If it is displayed, it is protected from automated harvesting in the same way as are email addresses visible on the official pages of Swiss universities. 

Profiles are created by us, to protect the portal from spamming. If you want to have a profile, ask us, by an individual email or by providing the relevant information by the following form:

Please provide a real email address of a real person. 

We will then tell you your username / login and your automatically generated but individual password. This you can change under "my profile", once you are logged in.

Here you will find a (very long) list of all profiles on the portal.

If you forget your password (whether or not you have changed it in the meantime), tell us: 

There are two types of profiles: personal profiles and  institutional profiles, for persons and institutions (universities, research groups, associations, groups, and so on) respectively. 

Personal profiles allow users to post articles, replies, comments and give individualised access to certain features of the portal. They are also used for the bibliography pages, which we plan to expand greatly.  

Institutional profiles also allow you to create content on the portal. More specifically, you can create information pages about your organisation and the things you are organising, and link such pages to events that show up in the agenda. 

Both personal and institutional profiles can change their profile information by clicking on "my profile" in the upper right corner. 

A personal profile provides information about a physical person. It contains:

• (always) a username, provided by us, that is unambiguous within our large bibliography (of more than 210'000 entries and approx. 65'000 authors), with extra letters after a hyphen added to your family name for disambiguation; 
• (always) an email address, provided by you, that is a real and at least in principle verifiable address of a real person; if you post (non-anonymously) an article on the portal, this email address will be shown on your profile; you may add more than one email address;
• (optionally) a title, if you want to be addressed specifically as he/him or she/her;
• (optionally) a choice of language (English/French/Italian/German) - please indicate your main language, not always English: we take great care to have a quadrilingual portal and communicate in all four languages;
• (optionally) a description field: this is by far the most important item; please take a short moment to say something about you that other users of the portal (you may assume them to be interested in philosophy) might find interesting - for example, say something about your philosophical interests or about what kind of philosophical consumer/producer you are; feel free to provide links, abstracts, and any other information you find useful;
• (optionally) a picture: this should be a picture of you
• (optionally) a link to your website: choose the one where people will find most information about you; it does not have to be your "official" or "academic" one;
• (optionally) a country: choose the one where your based or philosophically active, not the one where you are from or received your education
• (optionally) a canton, if the country chosen was Switzerland: again, choose the one where you are philosophically active; if you are commuting, it does not have to be the one where you are employed;
• (optionally) a Swiss University, if you are employed by one, whether or not directly, or through an SNSF project, or in some other way; if you are employed by several Swiss universities, choose the one where your employment is highest;
• (optionally) some philosophical societies; if you are or would like to become member of any of these societies, tick their respective box; you can choose among the regional members of the Swiss Philosophical Society (more info: de / fr / it):
  • krino (Bern)
  • Philosophische Gesellschaft Basel
  • Philosophische Gesellschaft Ostschweiz
  • Philosophische Gesellschaft Zentralschweiz
  • Groupe Genevois der Société Romande de Philosophie
  • Groupe Vaudois der Société Romande de Philosophie
  • Philosophische Gesellschaft Zürich
  • Groupe Neuchâtelois der Société Romande de Philosophie
  • Società Filosofica della Svizzera Italiana
  • Société Valaisanne de Philosophie
  • Société Philosophique de Fribourg
• You can also tell us that you are a philosophy student in Switzerland and thereby member of any of the student associations at Swiss Universities:
  • Basel (Fachgruppe Philosophie)
  • Bern (Fachschaft Philosophie)
  • Fribourg (Fachschaft Philosophie)
  • Genève (PhilEAs)
  • Lausanne (OrPhi)
  • Neuchâtel (Phink!)
  • Lugano (Ratio)
  • EPFL (Epphilo)
• Finally, there are four thematic associations of which you might be a member: 
  • Swiss Society of Logic and Philosophy of Science
  • Swiss Graduate Society for Logic and Philosophy of Science
  • Association for philosophy of law and social philosophy (SVRSP / ASDPS)
  • Association of High-School Teachers (VSPM / SPES / SFIS)
• (optionally) if you are a high-school teacher of philosophy in Switzerland, you can tell us where, using our list of philosophy-teaching high-schools in the German, French and Italian-speaking parts of Switzerland
  • Aargau
  • Basel
  • Bern
  • Fribourg / Freiburg
  • Genève
  • Neuchâtel/Jura
  • Ostschweiz
  • Solothurn
  • Ticino
  • Vaud
  • Wallis / Valais
  • Zentralschweiz
  • Zürich
• If you teach philosophy in more than one school, choose the one with the highest rate of employment.
  If our list of Swiss high-schools where philosophy is taught (as such, not as part of something else) is incomplete or incorrect (which may very well be), please choose "other" and provide the name of the school where you are teaching philosophy. 
• (optionally) Last, but not least, you can click a box to say that you would like to become a member of the association Philosophie.ch. Please find more information in English, French, German and Italian. Please note that we will count you as a member (and, e.g., invite you to the general assembly) only once your payment of at least 20 CHF has been received.

Unless you have posted at least one article, you can choose whether or not your email address is shown on your profile. We strongly suggest you choose that it is shown.

Your email address is normally shown if you have posted at least one article (and the profile is not registered as pseudonymous). This allows other users to contact you and affirms your right to your intellectual content. If you provide us with a very good reason that your email address should not be shown (even though you have published an article), we will make an exception and not show your email.

An institutional profile provides information about an institution (group, initiative, place, journal, etc.), written by someone authorised (in some large sense) to speak in the name of that institution.

For instiutional profiles, we normally provide a logo and do a presentation page. We also try to gather information about possible contact persons. Here you find the list of institutional profiles we have already created. 

In addition to this information, you may provide, on the "edit profile" view, any of the following:

• a choice of language: this is the language we should use to correspond with your institution via the contact person;
• an email address: this should be the official email of the institution, e.g. of the info.... kind or of the secretary or manager, if there is such a thing;
• a description: this is the most important field - please provide a concise and general description of your institution, but as specific and interesting as possible; e.g. instead of "teaching and researching philosophy", a philosophy department could say that it has X employees, Y BA students and Z MA students
• password: if several people use the institutional profile, make sure to keep them updated about password changes;
• one or several webpages of your institution, separated by commas;
• a country and (if the country chosen is Switzerland), a canton: indicate where your institution is physically located or, if it is not, where it is mostly active. 

Email addresses of institutions are always shown, whether or not they are authors of information pages.

Given our commitment to free speech, we are happy to give you the opportunity to post articles and make comments under a pseudonym, under two conditions:

• you are a real person (not a group, institution, bot or representative of someone else) who also has a profile and we know your real name and have a real, personal email address of you, and know what your pseudonyms are;
• you use your pseudonymous posting rights responsibly and legally, i.e. not in ways annoying other portal users or breaching the Swiss laws (which forbid, nota bene, not just libelous but also e.g. racist or otherwise discriminatory posts).

Under these conditions, we are happy to create a pseudonymous profile for you: take good care of it and fill it with some information. 

For pseudonymous profiles, the email address provided has to be real, but will not be shown on the profile, even if there is at least one article posted. 

In particular, you are invited to join our "game of pseudonyms", "Let the Dead Speak for Themselves", where you may impersonate a dead and famous philosopher. 

For anonymous postings, there is no separate procedure: just choose a suitable pseudonym (which may be a variant of "anon"). 

We already have created a lot of profiles - for everyone in the bibliography and for all Swiss institutions we are aware of who independently organise or host events that have to do with philosophy. 

If you have a profile, you should have been notified. Once you know the username and password, you can log in and change the password.

If you don't have a profile, you can click on the bottom "login" on the top right of any page. Then, you will see a link called "register a profile". If you click on it, you will get a pre-generated mail for the team to register your profile.  

If you want to create a profile for an institution, please add this information in the email. 

If you want to create a pseudonymous profile, please say so and also communicate the pseudonym chosen. 

• Log in with your username and your old password. 
• Click on "edit profile".
• Insert your new password oin the field "password".
• Repeat it in the field "confirm password".
• Click on "Save" or "Save and Quit"

Click on "Have you forgotten your password?" on the login page

Our team will receive an email and we will provide a new password to the email address the notification is sent from. Alternatively, you may also click on the button below:  

If you have forgotten your password, please write to us or press the following button:

Personal profiles can post articles and replies. Articles are published under a CC-Licence, registered for a DOI with CrossRef, dated and attributed to the personal profile in question. It is not possible to delete or change them after publication. The information we need to create a personal profile is just first and last name and an email address. You are very welcome to provide additional information - it would be particularly great if you could upload a picture of you too! That you have a profile at all just means that you are author or co-author of at least one item in our extensive bibliography, which we have compiled using publicly available resources. 

Institutional profiles can post information pages and events, and also change their profile information. Their picture is normally the logo, or something that can go proxy for it. If you have a better one than the one we're using, please send it to us, together with any information you may want to have added to the presentation page. The presentation page is done by us, on the basis of publicly available information and whatever else you tell us. Information pages, about events, series of events, colloquia, degrees, courses etc. are your responsibility - you can edit them at any moment. 

If you have trouble with any of the above, please contact us at info@philosophie.ch.