Abstracts: The Philosopher's Kryptonite?
Is seems to me that abstracts are much less common in philosophy than in other disciplines. Whenever I look into, say, some psychology literature, nearly every paper on ingenta, etc. has an abstract. It's way helpful when you're sifting through a bunch of literature and trying to figure out whether to read the article or not.

Of course, there are philosophers who house drafts of their own papers with abstracts on their own sites. Take Richard Holton or Stephen Finlay, for example. (Thanks guys!) But I'd really like to see the movement more widespread in the discipline.

Am I way off on my claim about the lack of abstracts in philosophy? If so, I still maintain that abstracts should be more common in any discipline. But if I'm not wrong, then why are there not more abstracts in places where philosophy articles are housed? I know journals very often require an abstract with submission, but then they just dump the abstract and publish the article. Is the abstract the philosopher's kryptonite? Is there something inherently evil about abstracts?
Posted by Josh May on 08.08.2008 at 3:02pm
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Justin, USC (mail):
I'd also like to see more abstracts in journals, for the reasons you mention. It would be nice to be able to look at the abstract for a paper to know how it would relate to what you're working on.

On the other hand, philosophers (at least those that I've read) are good about telling you what's going on in the first couple paragraphs of their paper. So, in those cases, an abstract may be superfluous.
8.8.2008 11:37pm
Josh (UCSB) (mail):
Yeah, most recent philosophers are good about stating early on what their paper is about.

It looks like Australasian is currently having abstracts at the beginning of each paper. I wish more journals would do that as well.

But even if journals, journal archivers, etc. provided abstracts, I think it's still a great idea for philosophers to have websites with a page full of their work with abstracts. Sometimes one wants to go look at a single philosopher's work like that, not just the literature in a certain area. Some philosophers already do this, and it's quite nice. USC's own Stephen Finlay has something like this, for example:

http://www-rcf.usc.edu/~finlay/
9.1.2008 2:52pm

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