some tips about using PhilPapers

If you’ve not used it before, a couple of tips may come in handy. Again, PhilPapers is HERE.

You’ll see the white search box at top right. If you’re looking for Speculative Realism, select “category finder.” Then type Speculative Realism in the box.

You should get the Speculative Realism page, which by agreement with the general editors currently has three subheadings: Object-Oriented Ontology, Speculative Materialism, and Speculative Realism, Misc.

Now here’s the problem… On some searches Levi Bryant is not showing up, on other searches Quentin Meillassoux is not showing up. Rest assured, I have added many of their publications already. The issue is as follows.

Look on the right-hand side of the screen, under “restrictions.” It seems like two restrictions are always set at first by default.

The first is for “online only,” meaning that it will only show publications that are available free online. If that’s selected, even books like After Finitude and Tool-Being won’t show up in the search.

The other restriction says “professional authors only.” What is a professional author? Well, this is the issue with many searches. There are apparently two ways to be counted as a “professional author.”

1. You go sign up for a PhilPapers account, and along with your name and institutional email address, you click that yes, you have a Ph.D. in Philosophy. There will then be a pull-down menu asking you your doctoral institution and the year you received your Ph.D. Once you’ve done that, your publications will appear in any “professional authors only” searches, so it’s not a bad idea to do this if you do happen to have a Philosophy Ph.D.

2. The other way to be counted as a professional author, according to David Chalmers, is to have published in “qualifying journals.” I’m not sure what those qualifying journals are, but presumably they are mostly of the sort in which analytically trained philosophers publish. (That’s just a guess on my part. But in any case, continental philosophy isn’t quite as much a “journal” culture as analytic philosophy is. Never has been.)

There seemed to be an issue when I started that there was no way to add page numbers for anthology chapters, but they have added the field or will soon add it. This can be very important for requesting book chapters via interlibrary loan, so I’m glad it will be added.

Thanks to those who have sent feedback on the Bibliography so far. It’s not yet finished, but we’re getting there.

OOO is going to be the biggest category by far, but that’s largely because I and Morton (who hasn’t even been added yet, though I have his list) like to publish lots of articles. We can’t include Meillassoux’s French writings, because this is an English-only database.

I’ve added everything of obvious relevance from The Speculative Turn and from the journal Speculations. As for Collapse, I’ll check the back issues when I’m in Egypt, since I have my hard copies there.

I’ve done most of this manually, so there may well be mistakes. Please do keep me informed of any.