PhilPapers

Posted on June 4, 2009
Filed Under Philosophy, Tech | 2 Comments

I know I’ve mentioned this before, but if you haven’t used it try out PhilPapers. It’s basically trying to do for philosophy what arxiv did for physics papers years ago. For various reasons primarily, I suspect, tied to the nature of journals in the humanities, the humanities have been far slower to accept the change to open access papers.

PhilPapers started out a bit rough but was much better than some of the repositories with a narrower focus. (Such as Phil Sci archive from the University of Pittsburgh) Anyway I still primarily go to JSTOR first for article searches. But I’m slowly converting over. Note that PhilPapers also has a staggering number of classic papers, including some from the 19th century.

The downside to PhilPapers is that most of these are just links to standard web pages. So while it avoids a lot of cruft that Google tends to find it’s also limited. (i.e. there are more links to Google Books – famous for intentionally missing pages – than I’d like.)

So it’s not really a replacement for JSTOR or related journal searches from your library. More a way to streamline what you’d find via Google.

Related posts:

  1. Phil Papers
  2. The Sideblog
  3. Science – Humanities Divide
  4. How Ugly…
  5. History of Philosophy and Charity
  6. About that Picture…

Comments

2 Responses to “PhilPapers”

I’m hoping this is Clark Goble that I’m contacting. And I apologize that this comment will have nothing to do with this post.

I’m a BYU student and I was looking for a piece of information I’m hoping you might be able to provide for me.

I’m looking for the passcode to the Ancient Studies Collection room in the HBLL, and I read in a post of yours on Millennial Star from several years ago that you spent some time in there at one time. If you have the passcode, I would greatly appreciate it if you might pass it along to me. There are important books in there I would like to spend some time with that are only available in that room.

Umm. I graduated in ’94. I doubt they even have the same doors. But given the expense of the books in there I doubt I’d give a password out to anyone I didn’t know. However since I can’t remotely remember the passcode anyway it’s not a big deal.

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