An Index of Philosophy Book Reviews
Matt Zwolinski (University of San Diego) says he has long thought it would be useful to have a website in which you could type in the name of a book and be shown all the different reviews of it that have been published.
Tired of waiting, he recently, “with a lot of help from Claude code,” started building such a site, focusing on academic philosophy books and reviews published in a selection of academic journals.
The result is PhilReviews. You type in the title of a book, and below it will appear a list of the reviews of it. Or you can click “advanced search” to search by author, journal publishing the review, reviewer, etc.
Still in development, PhilReviews has about 14,000 reviews indexed. Professor Zwolinski says he welcomes suggestions.
Try it out here.
This is amazing, thank you! I’ll definitely be making use of this. I don’t know how feasible this is, but if there was a way to include book symposia, that would be wonderful, since those are often useful in a way similar to book reviews.
Interesting and helpful, though at only 18,457 reviews at present, obviously a work in progress, as stated. Found one citation when searching ‘Reviewer’ field (in Advanced Search) for ‘Justin Weinberg’. I wonder: how many book reviews has Justin published in total?
Looks like it could be very useful, especially if its database gets more comprehensive. It found 1 of the 4 book reviews I have done: it found 1 in Mind, but missed 2 in Environmental Ethics and, surprisingly, 1 in NDPR.
That’s exactly the detailed feedback that can help the developer check results and expand the scope of indexed reviews.
Metascience is a strictly review based journal that is missing from the database (I think).
Thanks, Justin. And thanks to everyone for the feedback so far. This project is still in its *very* early stages (I literally started working on it four days ago). So any feedback that folks have to offer would be very helpful, anything from specific reviews that are missing, to journals that should be added, to more general suggestions for improvement. Whatever I can do to make it more useful!
Matt, while I was enjoying the festive last four days of Mardis Gras, you (and your underpaid research assistant) have built – in four days! – a valuable tool of great use. It is proof of Eric Raymond’s statement (in his essay, “The Cathedral and the Bazaar”):
Thank you!
Matt, for “journals that should be added”, as you asked above, it might be helpful if you could post here a bulleted list of the approximately 30 journals currently indexed (and searchable in the dropdown box of Advanced Search)
Thanks Matt
This is a super resource. You are a saint.
I am delighted that you already include the great review of my book, Kuhn’s Intellectual Path, by Peter Barker, in Philosophy of Science.
You might want to also include reviews from the Springer/Nature journal Metascience – they publish reviews of books in history, philosophy and sociology of science. DISCLOSURE: I was one of the editors of the journal for 10 years, and commissioned about 600 or so reviews.
Many thanks
Brad
Wonderful idea, thank you! Here’s another source of reviews:
BJPS Review of Books
https://www.thebsps.org/reviewofbooks/
Splendid! And minor plug: JHP and NDPR are here, but there are a bunch of ancient philosophy journals that have robust book review sections, including: Phronesis, Ancient Philosophy, Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, and Polis (my own journal). But that said, lots of ancient philosophy journals don’t publish book reviews (or do so rarely)–so no need to add e.g. OSAP, Apeiron, etc.
And, it’s worth noting as well, many ancient philosophy books are reviewed in Bryn Mawr Classical Review. I don’t know if there’s an easy way of sorting out the ancient philosophy ones from the general Classics ones (the word “philosophy” is probably a reasonably good proxy; it’ll overgenerate entries, but probably better to have too many than too few).
I love the idea of this tool!
As a quick check, when I searched for reviews I have written, it found 8 of them, but missed 3 others: a review of WD Hart “The Evolution of Logic” in the Bulletin of Symbolic Logic in 2011, a review of Jody Azzouni “Tracking Reason” in The Philosophical Review in 2008, and a review of Frederic Schick “Ambiguity ad Logic” in Mind in 2007
It found all the reviews I published in Phil Review and Mind after 2010, but for my 2016 Phil Review review it got the title of the book, “Quitting Certainties”, but not the author, Michael Titelbaum. Searching for “Titelbaum”, it found three reviews of that book, but searching for “Quitting Certainties” it found those three plus mine.
Amazing resource! Another couple of journals to add to the database – Phenomenology & the Cognitive Sciences, Phenomenological Reviews
Philosophy in Review is another review-only journal.
Excellent – thank you!
I would recommend looking into otherwise-religious journals or Philosophy+Theology journals and sites, which review a large amount of philosophical literature, especially in ancient philosophy, medieval philosophy, early modern religion, philosophy of religion, and the like. I am more familiar with the Catholic ones, like The Heythrop Journal, Thomistica, Nova et Vetera, The Thomist, New Blackfriars, European Journal for the Study of Thomas Aquinas, Divinitas, Angelicum, Gregorianum, The Aquinas Review, The New Ressourcement . . .
Typo: early modern *philosophy*.
I’d also add American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, Faith and Philosophy, Modern Theology, International Journal of Systematic Theology,
Excellent. Let me look into these!
The Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics publishes many (open access) reviews: https://ejpe.org/journal/issue/archive
Great suggestion. I’m on it.