I'm pleased to announce the launch of PhilPapers, a virtual environment for philosophical research. David Bourget and I have been working on this project for a year or two now, 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. 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 the site and try it yourself (we've compiled a basic introduction to some of the features). Even 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, discussed earlier on this weblog. 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 various aspects of the category system are discussed in much more detail at the Categorization Project page, and feedback is welcome at the Categorization Project discussion forum.
The discussion forums are another key feature of PhilPapers. These are devoted to discussing the papers 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 especially 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 seminal "Consciousness is Underived Intentionality"), 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 (currently available online as an RSS feed), and who has contributed some very useful Javascript features to the website. Tim Crane and Barry Smith of the Institute for Philosophy at the University of London have also been very supportive of the project. In a few months David will be moving to London for a two-year post-doc that will be partially devoted to e-research projects such as PhilPapers. So we hope that PhilPapers has a bright future ahead.
This is brilliant! Thanks very much to all involved.
Posted by: Lee Walters | January 28, 2009 at 04:34 PM
I've tried to create a user account twice (with 2 different e-mail accounts I have). Both times, when I tried to validate my account, the login failed. I tried signing in repeatedly with both accounts, and it keeps failing. I'm positive that I'm giving it the right password.
Posted by: Dylan | January 28, 2009 at 10:33 PM
Scratch that -- it's working now.
Posted by: Dylan | January 28, 2009 at 10:35 PM
A few users have had a problem with the email validation process. Please try again if you've experienced difficulties. You can request a new validation email using the "lost password" option in the "sign in" menu. Also remember to check your spam folder if you didn't get the email.
Posted by: David Bourget | January 28, 2009 at 10:48 PM
A great resource! Thanks
I have just registered there. Everything is fine, except (it appears) that there are some bugs in customization of profiles. I was not able to edit (ff3 & ie8) my profile for a second time and post comments in the discussion forum as of now.
On the *new online papers*, does *philpapers* use the same script of *opp* of Wo? the RSS feeds appear to be similar. Thanks once again.
Posted by: Sumesh | January 29, 2009 at 01:09 AM
I've tried repeatedly to register. I don't receive the email with a link to validate my email. I've disabled my spam filter and I've checked both my spam folder and my quarantine folder. I've tried using different browsers. Do you any other suggestions besides "try again." I've tried over ten times.
Posted by: David Sobel | January 29, 2009 at 01:01 PM
Thanks for the hard work you guys have put into this!
Posted by: Daniel Morgan | January 29, 2009 at 03:36 PM
Everything works fine now. Thanks.
The discussion forum at *philpapers* is a great addition to philosophy in Cyberia. Contrary to typical blog comments, it can be a much-needed, online, open *peer commentary* section like that of BBS as well.
Concepts well executed!
Posted by: Sumesh | January 29, 2009 at 04:37 PM
Nobody asked Socrates for a degree or affiliation with some university to be able to seek knowledge or share his understanding of the questions he raised. This is my comment about the 'backgroud' required for opening an account with you.
I belong to Sanjan Nagar Institute of Philsophy and Arts established in 1995 in Lahore, Pakistan. For the past fourteen years we(and the founder of the institute for the past forty years, since knowldge started unleashing about the arin and mind)have been working on acquiring a comprehensive undersanding of the evolution and working of the human mind, not only in the context of the emergence of living things and their evolution but also Nature as whole since before the big bang. I do not know if that makes us eligible to open an account at your website.
There is a lot more i would like to comment on regarding the abscence of an objective behind your initiative of making research and philosophical work on the mind available to poeple on your site; whihc really is a problme with nearly all of the academic work being carried out on mind, or in conferences of mind and conciousness, but i don't know if i am allowed to be that frank
Posted by: Iram Tauqir | February 27, 2009 at 05:08 AM
Outstanding stuff. A great resource.I-Phi 2.0.
Posted by: CP3 | February 27, 2009 at 10:50 PM