I want to pass on a message from JeeLoo Liu about her work integrating Chinese philosophy into the valuable PhilPapers on-line resource. We owe JeeLoo many thanks! Please read on to see where things stand on this project, and to see how you can contribute to its continued development.

JeeLoo writes:

Back in April I accepted David Chalmers’ invitation to serve as category editor for Chinese Philosophy at PhilPapers, an online research site run by David Chalmers (ANU) and David Bourget (U. of London). I agreed to take on this daunting task because I have used PhilPapers for my other research topics before and have found it a very useful research tool, so I wish to have one set up for Chinese philosophy.  I first worked with Chalmers to set up fine categories for papers on Chinese philosophy, both in terms of period/philosopher and in terms of topics. For the past four months, I have spent countless hours sorting over 4,000 papers into these various categories. What I find uplifting is that Chinese philosophy has become a vibrant research area and there are many interesting paper topics of which I was previously ignorant. I have also found and downloaded many papers related to my current research topic.

Now the initial categorization is done, I am asking for volunteers to further sort out sub-categorization (such as under ‘classical Confucianism,’ you’ll need to sort out ‘Confucius’, ‘Mencius’, ‘Xunzi’ or ‘misc.’) When you click on any category and see this line on top of the page, please just volunteer to do it: “This category needs an editor. We encourage you to help if you are qualified.”

You can volunteer for related sub-categories. It shouldn’t be too much work to do the sub-cat (some sub-cats have nothing to do for now. The ones most needing editors are the following:

Anyone can use this service, but to be an editor, you’ll need to set up an account which is free. You only need to enter an email address and some information. See: User accounts are not compulsory, and you can browse PhilPapers listings without one. But creating an account enables many useful functions, including personal reading lists and bibliographies, participation in the discussion forums, submission and editing of items, and much else. Every user has a profile page, which contains lists of the user’s works and their areas of interest, among other things, and which can be made public or private as the user chooses.

If you have other questions about using this site, here is the list of frequently asked questions and answers: http://philpapers.org/help/faq.html

For your own research interest, you can set up your own topics under ‘My bibliography’ at the bottom of each entry and then enter the theme of your choice. You can also start a discussion, etc.

However, I have found many errors in the database itself, esp. with regard to spacing for authors’ names or paper titles. I have corrected the errors I saw, but must have missed many more. When you see an error, please use the ‘edit’ link and correct it.

I hope you will find this site a useful research tool and use it as much as you like.