philosophy-research

philosophy-research is a skill for Claude Code from AI-4-Phi/PhilLit. It costs 78 tokens per session (3,232 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A research skill for finding and checking philosophy papers, encyclopedia entries, and related academic sources. It searches services such as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, PhilPapers, Semantic Scholar, and OpenAlex.

In plain words
What is it for?
It supports paper discovery, citation searches, reference tracing, content enrichment, recommendations, and Crossref-based citation verification.
Why use it?
It gathers literature from several academic sources and verifies citation details, reducing unreliable or incomplete references.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: allowed-tools in frontmatter. Also seen: positional $N argument.

Part of the phillit plugin — 3 skills, 4 agents, 4 hooks shipped together

Good fit It supports paper discovery, citation searches, reference tracing, content enrichment, recommendations, and Crossref-based citation verification.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/ai-4-phi/phillit/philosophy-research
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add AI-4-Phi/PhilLit --skill philosophy-research
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/AI-4-Phi/PhilLit

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install phillit, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 3 skills, 4 agents, 4 hooks.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for philosophy-research

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ai-4-phi/phillit/philosophy-research.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/ai-4-phi/phillit/philosophy-research)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/ai-4-phi/phillit/philosophy-research"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ai-4-phi/phillit/philosophy-research.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 78 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,232 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00078 $0.03232
Opus 5 $0.00039 $0.01616
Sonnet 5 $0.00016 $0.00646
Haiku 4.5 $0.00008 $0.00323

Measured 8d ago against content hash 7d6b9968da9c, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-08, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

philosophy-research scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 8d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 27 executable files (scripts/__init__.py, scripts/brave_search.py, scripts/check_setup.py, …), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/philosophy-research/SKILL.md · 268 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 268 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Philosophy Research Skill

Search and retrieve academic philosophy literature using structured APIs instead of WebSearch.

Setup check: If the current directory has no .phillit/ marker, PhilLit has not been set up here — offer to run /phillit:setup (a quick one-time step) before continuing.

When to Use This Skill

Use this skill when:

  • Searching for philosophy papers, articles, or concepts
  • Accessing SEP (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) content
  • Finding citations and references for papers
  • Verifying that a paper exists with correct metadata
  • Building bibliographies for literature reviews

Search Workflow

Batching: when you have several searches, run them in ONE shell call — & + wait between scripts hitting DIFFERENT APIs, plain sequential lines between calls to the SAME API (its shared rate limiter would serialize them anyway, and the limiter's file lock is Unix-only, so same-API parallelism buys nothing and can race on Windows). Parallel fan-outs give each script --output and finish with grep -m1 '"status"' <files> — full results land in files, one short attributed status line each lands on screen; sequential same-API chains with small payloads skip both and just consume the inline stdout (exception: verify_paper.py always keeps --output — the metadata cleaner reads its files — while its status prints inline). Never batch across a dependency: a search whose query is composed from an earlier search's results is its own call.

Phase 1: SEP & IEP (Most Authoritative)

# Discover relevant SEP articles
bash "$PHILLIT_ROOT/bin/phillit-run" skills/philosophy-research/scripts/search_sep.py "free will"

# Extract structured content from an SEP entry
bash "$PHILLIT_ROOT/bin/phillit-run" skills/philosophy-research/scripts/fetch_sep.py freewill --sections "preamble,1,2,bibliography"
bash "$PHILLIT_ROOT/bin/phillit-run" skills/philosophy-research/scripts/fetch_sep.py freewill --bibliography-only

# Discover relevant IEP articles (different coverage from SEP)
bash "$PHILLIT_ROOT/bin/phillit-run" skills/philosophy-research/scripts/search_iep.py "free will"

# Extract structured content from an IEP entry
bash "$PHILLIT_ROOT/bin/phillit-run" skills/philosophy-research/scripts/fetch_iep.py freewill --sections "1,2,3,bibliography"
bash "$PHILLIT_ROOT/bin/phillit-run" skills/philosophy-research/scripts/fetch_iep.py freewill --bibliography-only

Read the full file on GitHub · 268 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 8d ago First seen · 268 lines · 78 tokens per session scan A 7d6b9968da9c

Subscribe to this mod's changes

philosophy-research is a skill published in the GitHub repository AI-4-Phi/PhilLit (42 stars, last pushed 3d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 78 tokens to every session and 3,232 once invoked, about $0.0004 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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