The Categorization Project

I worry that I may have missed something and my apologies if so, but I can find no global category for my writings. The topic is usually nonduality, either directly or as the general context, yet there is no category for this. I do not wish to use the 'Idealism' category since it is not a mind-only theory, nor 'Monism' since it is not a reduction to a numerical one. 

Nondualism is an ancient and firmly-established position that should be distinguished from most forms of Idealism and Monism. Yet there is nowhere to place essays on this topic. At present I am forced to use 'Metaphysics. Misc.', which makes little sense given the respectability, importance and global popularity of my view.  

The absence of such a category means that writing cannot be collected together and browsed under a common heading and cannot be searched for by those who wish to familiarise themselves with this view.

It also suggests that there is a blind-spot in the approach to philosophy being adopted here. I can und ... (read more)

Editors of The Acorn request addition of an area under the Philosophical Traditions cluster. The area would be named "Peace and Nonviolence."

Such an area would facilitate adding figures such as Gandhi, King, Chavez, and Jane Addams, who currently have no listings in the PhilPapers categorization. There are also important peace theorists such as Galtung and Gene Sharp whose work would be suitably included in this area.

Philosophical reflections on such figures make up a large and growing body of study, involving conceptual terms such as nonviolence, positive peace, or satyagraha -- terms which are not yet listed as PhilPapers categories.

Nonviolence currently has no taxonomy. Peace is listed, but only under Kant.

A few related terms do appear already:

-Pacifism appears under War;
-Civil Disobedience appears under Social and Political, States and Nations.
-Race and Civil Rights appears under Gender, Race, and Sexuality.

These categories could appear as cross-classified hyperlinks under &q ... (read more)

This bug is probably known, but I don't see a discussion of it, so here it is again (hopefully helpfully). In its current incarnation, PhilPapers indexes works in any language, including works written wholly or partially in non-Latin Unicode subsets, and it seems to have been true for some time that even for articles in English, PhilPapers accepts titles and abstracts that include non-Latin-subset strings. For instance, Stanley Rosen's "ΣΩΦΡΟΣYΝΗ and Selbstbewusstsein" is indexed (though misspelled, probably by OCR - the record has now been corrected.)) This flexibility is awesome for at least two reasons: it helps to nudge the profession farther from Anglocentrism, and it lets researchers who include, e.g., Ancient Greek in their titles and abstracts have these indexed without distortion.

However, it looks as if the search function may not have kept pace with the indexing function when it comes to non-Latin-Unicode-subset strings. Thus, while we know that the aforementioned Rosen arti ... (read more)

Are there guidelines on what criteria a book review ought to meet for inclusion in PhilPapers? The issue doesn't seem to be directly addressed in the FAQ (though reviews are notably not mentioned as an included category). The last discussion thread I've found on the subject dates from 2008; apologies in advance if I've overlooked more recent instructions.
Specifically, I've started to edit the leaf on Plato's Charmides in which many reviews of few monographs, if included, would threaten to overwhelm both the latter and even journal articles in search results. Since I don't see an easy way to filter out reviews from the search results through the Advanced Search menu* (in which case it would be harmless to include them), it seems to me that it might give a better signal/noise ratio simply to exclude reviews unless they meet some relatively high bar. But, of course, I want to conform to the general editorial practice at PhilPapers. Thanks. 

*(the word "review" being common and polyse ... (read more)

I find myself unable to categorize my writings as I would like since my metaphysical position is not represented among the categories. Could we have a sub-category 'nondualism' (or an equivalent term) under 'metaphysics', so that we of this persuasion do not have to use 'Miscellaneous' all the time? At present we have 'dualism and 'monism' and no third option. Thank you.  
.   

This way of sifting through material to categorize via David Bourget is very helpful:

Go to "Material to Categorize" for your category, or just go to the category directly. In the "search inside" box, use a query like this:

@source "journal of philosophy" or use keywords like "neuroethics"

This will show you all the contents under this category that have this source. To see the material to categorize, order the results by category. The material to categorize will be at the top of the
listing. To see the categorization shortcuts, enable this option in the options on the right.

Using this search method can allow you to go through and categorize everything in one area of philosophy or from one journal at a time. Anyway, I found this very useful - hope it helps other editors (especially if you are dealing with a big back-log)

I am not sure that I understand how the changelog (edlog) works. For example, http://philpapers.org/rec/MORTCO-9 is categorized as 'Divine attributes, misc'. But in the changelog (for editors) of this category it says for this item 'removed'. But it has not been removed, it is still there. Further, if I click 'reverse', it is still in this category. What is the effect of the 'reverse'? What am I misunderstanding?
Daniel

I propose that there be a subtopic of 'Pride' to be categorized as follows:

Value Theory: Normative Ethics: Moral Psychology: Moral States and Processes: Pride

This subtopic would be siblings with anger, envy, gratitude, guilt and shame, hope, jealousy, and love, among others. I estimate that there would presently be about 20 entries, which would place it on par with many of its siblings (as far as popularity goes).

I also think the emotion of contempt merits its own subtopic, given the important recent attention given to it. There would be at least five entries for contempt.

When I select 'global metaphysical theories' in the categorisation system I am presented with a list of theories that does not include mine, and I am forced to select 'miscellaneous'. I would rather not do this. It seems odd that nondualism, as a distinct and unfalsified solution for consciousness, is not given an easily findable category. This cannot help its cause. .    

Would it be possible to add it to the list of global theories? Or did I just fail to see it?

Any chance Antoine Arnauld can get a category (under 17th/18th Century French Philosophy)? Perhaps I have idiosyncratic views on this, but I regard him as more important than many of the philosophers who already have their own categories. There's a fair amount of literature on him in English, and, now that PhilPapers is multi-lingual, a lot more in French. A PhilPapers search for 'Arnauld' currently yields 97 results.

I have found quite many philosophical texts about the "Resurrection of Jesus". I suggest that we need a leaf category for this under "Christianity" with an alias under "Miracles". They do not fit into "Resurrection" because that is about human life after death. (The articles that should be in "Resurrection" in my view could all be in "Afterlife".)
Daniel

Good day,
My leaf category ‘Miracles, Misc.‘ contains already 261 texts, and I will find more. I propose a few new leaf categories:
* The definition of the concept of a miracle (or omit 'The definition of')

* The possibility and nature of miracles (or omit 'and nature') (for all the discussions about whether and how there is room for miracles, about whether in a miracle God makes the wave function collapse, etc.)

* Epistemological questions about miracles.
Yours,
Daniel

Good day,
I find no suitable leaf categories for
- German 17th century philosophy, often called Protestant Scholasticism, e.g. Taurellus, Christoph Scheibler, Cornelius Martini, Clemens Timpler. There is a lot of these texts! They  are all in Latin. This movement begins quite precisely in 1598. At http://von-wachter.de/scans.htm you find a list of these philosophers. I propose a category "17th Century German Philosophy" for them. Alternatively, it could be "17th Century Philosophy" (including British, French and other philosophers too) or "Protestant Scholasticism".

- German realist 18th century philosophy, e.g. Christian Thomasius, Christian August Crusius, Martin Knutzen, Johann Franz Budde, Joachim Lange, August Friedrich Müller, Johann Georg Walch, and if we take Christian von Wolff to be a realist, he fits into this group too. Some of this is in Latin, some in German. They could be put into a category "18th century German philosophy, misc." or "18th century German reali ... (read more)

As far as I can tell, there is no option to put "Philosophy of Education" as a sub-category.  There should be.  

I've now been doing some sub-sub-sub-editing on vagueness for a while, and there is one main categorization difficulty I keep encountering: This is entries for the "edited volumes" on a subject with contributions by many individuals and for many individual subcategories.

I have so far put these into the "miscalleneous" categories. The alternative seemed to be putting them in each and every sub-category or couple of sub-categories for which they contain a paper, which can easily be up to fourteen. Neither seems quite right.

Do we have a policy of not listing the volumes but only the individual papers, which I missed? If not is there any policy for classifying edited volumes, and what is it? And if there is no policy, should there be one and if yes, what should it be?

Thanks.
Susanne

I would like to suggest an additional method of categorization for the papers on this archive: every paper can be tagged with a university affiliation i.e. the university to which the author was affiliated at the time of publication.

If this happens, users can be presented with a list of universities such that clicking on a particular university gives a list of papers published from that university, grouped by author. So, for example, I could click on "University of Pittsburgh" and see a list of papers published from UPitt, grouped by author. Then, I could compare this list, side by side, with a list of papers published from UPitt's neighbour, Carnegie Mellon University, and note the radical differences in style, content, method, etc, etc.

At a higher level, universities could be grouped under higher levels of categorization - by country, for example. Then I would be able to compare, side by side, philosophical papers published by American authors vs. philosophical papers published by ... (read more)

Hi,

I've just started up as editor for the Self-Consciousness leaf and, before I really get started, thought I'd ask for advice on how the category should be structured. In particular, I note that there are already two categories - 'Self-Consciousness in Psychology' and 'Animal Self-Consciousness'  (both falling under Philosophy of Cognitive Science) - that cover some very closely related ground. My question is what ought the relationship be between these and the general Self-Consciousness category (falling under Philosophy of Mind)? My own preference would be for these two to sub-categories of Self-Consciousness (is it possible to do this whilst also keeping them in Philosophy of Cog Sci?). It seems to me that there is also scope for some further sub-categories within Self-Consciousness, e.g. Self-consciousness and agency, apperception, Immunity to error through misidentification, etc.

Any help greatly appreciated

Best, Joel

Hi all,

I noted that many papers with "truthlikeness" in the title are not categorized under the "Verisimilitude" leaf in General PoS, which would be the right category.

I would suggest to rename this leaf as "Verisimilitude and truthlikeness" or "Verisimilitude, truthlikeness and truth approximation" since the three terms (and surely the first two) are used as synonyms in the relevant literature.

This may help in categorizing at least all truthlikeness-papers.

Thank you for your great work.

Gustavo

We currently categorize Functions as a leaf within Misc Evolutionary Biology.  Evolutionary accounts of functions are prominent, but there are quite a few accounts, especially recently, opposed to evolutionary ones.  To capture the wider debate, I propose a new leaf under Misc Philosophy of Biology called "Functions and Functional Explanations".  The new leaf might obviate the old one, however.