PhilPapers
http://philpapers.org
I'm pleased to announce the launch of PhilPapers, a virtual
environment for philosophical research. PhilPapers has been developed
at the ANU Centre for Consciousness by David Bourget and me, with
significant help from Wolfgang Schwarz. PhilPapers is an outgrowth of
the MindPapers project in the philosophy of mind, but it is much
greater in scope and ambition. PhilPapers encompasses all areas of
philosophy, and it has many features that MindPapers lacks.
The core of PhilPapers is a database of close to 200,000 articles and
books in philosophy, concreentrating especially although not
exclusively on items that are available online. Around this database,
the site has all sorts of tools for accessing the articles and books
online wherever possible, for discussing them in discussion forums,
for classifying them in relevant areas of philosophy, for searching
and browsing in many different ways, for creating personal
bibliographies and personal content alerts, and much more.
The best way to get an idea of what PhilPapers can do is to go to
http://philpapers.org and try it yourself. A casual browser can
browse listings for new and old papers, search for papers in a given
area or by a specific author, read the discussion forums, and so on.
However, we encourage you to create a user account, which enables many
more sophisticated features. If you do this, you'll have a profile
page from which you can set up personal research tools such as
bibliographies, filters, and content alerts (via RSS or email). Your
profile page will include a list of your own work (compiled via name
matching), which you can edit where appropriate. With a user account,
you can also submit new entries (giving publication information and/or
a link, and optionally uploading a paper to our repository), edit and
categorize existing entries, and contribute to discussion forums.
At the moment, the PhilPapers database includes entries for 188,000
articles (typically via publication information and/or links, with
full papers stored elsewhere). The database has been compiled mainly
through automatically harvesting many Internet sources. It includes
entries for (i) 124,000 journal articles harvested from the websites
of more than 200 philosophical journals, (ii) 33,000 books harvested
from the Library of Congress database, (iii) 18,000 books and articles
from the MindPapers database, (iv) 7000 papers harvested from more
than 1000 personal websites, (v) 5000 papers harvested from Internet
archives, (vi) 1300 historical e-texts from the Episteme Links
database, and (vii) a few hundred user submissions. About 95% of the
articles are available online (via links to journal sites, personal
sites, archives, and so on), while about 17% of the books are
available online (typically via a Google Books preview). The database
itself is growing fast. For example, the addition of books has just
started and is still in progress (so far we have only added books
published after 1970).
A key feature of PhilPapers is a fine-grained category system for
philosophical areas. The system is an extension of the MindPapers
category system, and now has about 3000 categories under five main
clusters with 6-8 main areas each. Of course the category system is
still very tentative and is subject to ongoing refinement. To date,
there has been only very partial categorization of papers, through
limited automatic and manual classification, and through inheriting
categories from MindPapers. However, we have developed a number of
categorization tools (e.g., a "categorize" link under each paper) that
users can use to classify entries themselves. Our hope is that over
time, in a Wiki-like way, this will lead to every entry being
categorized in 1-3 categories, with resulting dynamic bibliographies
for all sorts of areas of philosophy. If you have relevant expertise,
please contribute by categorizing papers. The PhilPapers site has
much more information under the "help" menu.
Discussion forums are another key feature of PhilPapers. These are
devoted to discussing the papers and books in PhilPapers, as well as
to discussing other philosophical and professional issues. By
clicking "Discuss" under a paper or book, you will be given the
opportunity either to create a discussion forum for that item, or to
contribute to an ongoing discussion. Each such forum will be included
in turn in encompassing forums for associated areas of philosophy,
where these encompassing forums can also include other discussion
threads, not associated with papers and books. There are also forums
for general philosophical discussion, for discussion of professional
issues, and for discussion of PhilPapers itself. These forums are
something of a grand experiment, but we encourage users to use them,
in the hope that these might become a central locus for discussion
among philosophers.
PhilPapers is primarily intended for professional philosophers and
graduate students, although anyone interested in the field is welcome
to use it. Non-professionals are subject to some restrictions in
contributing articles (contributions are possible, but they won't be
included in the default "professional authors only" filter for listing
entries), and in contributing to the discussion forums (for which they
are subject to a daily posting limit). We hope that this arrangement
strikes a reasonable balance between keeping the site accessible to
all, and maintaining a high quality that will maximize the value of
the site to researchers in the field.
PhilPapers has been through a month or so of beta testing with a
limited number of users, who have uncovered various bugs and other
issues, but there are certainly many problems that remain. For now,
the site remains in "beta" mode, and we encourage all users to report
any bugs that they encounter, via the bug report link at the top of
every page, or through the bug report forum. (So far we've mainly
optimized the site for recent versions of Firefox and Explorer, and
there may be problems with other browsers.) There are also numerous
glitches in the database, especially for articles harvested from
personal websites. In these cases, we encourage users who know the
correct information to correct the entries themselves, using the
"edit" link under each entry. We'll monitor edits, but we hope that
the editing functionality will lead to a self-correcting system over
time. (Users might start by correcting any errors in the listings for
their own articles.) More generally, we encourage you to give
feedback and suggestions in the forums dedicated to discussion of
PhilPapers.
Finally, I should say that this site is largely a product of the
programming and design genius of David Bourget, who had the idea for
the project in the first place and who has done most of the hard work.
He has done this in the middle of writing his Ph.D. thesis and having
articles published in Nous, the Journal of Consciousness Studies, and
the Blackwell Companion to Consciousness. (My own role has mainly
been limited to designing the category system and to endless
discussion.) A major role has also been played by Wolfgang Schwarz,
who designed the system for harvesting papers from individuals'
websites, and who has contributed some very useful Javascript features
to the site.
--David Chalmers.
