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Georgetown College Research Information Sheet Philosophy
A word on the Internet... There are many web sites and pages on the Internet that deal with philosophy; some are by individuals, some are university or college web pages, and others are provided by professional associations or commercial vendors. Learn how to evaluate the pages you are looking at! No, everything is not on the Internet, and, everything on the Internet may not be good! And remember, these pages and any links to other sources and pages are subject to copyright laws. Suggestion... Need help? Ask a Librarian! Please note: if you use any of the Internet links on this page you will need to use your browsers features to return here. REFERENCE MATERIALS Encyclopedia of Philosophy (REF B 41 .E5 v.1-8) - a good starting point when researching a topic in philosophy, provides excellent overviews on topics and people. Accompanied by supplements. The Encyclopedia of Religion (REF BL31.E46 1986 v.1-16) - really focused on religion and theology but can be a valuable tool for information on philosophical concepts, terms, and people. Fifty Major Philosophers: a Reference Guide (REF B72.C59 1988) - gives concise overall views of individual philosophers. Humanities Index (REF AI3 ‚b .H85) - indexes the area of philosophy as well as other related fields. Available online through First Search, see Citation Databases on the Library's web page. The Philosopher's Index (Current Periodicals | Internet) - an international index with abstracts to philosophical periodicals, including interdisciplinary journals, relating to philosophy. Current print copy only; online is accessible from the Library's web page under Citation Databases, or click this link. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy http://plato.stanford.edu/contents.html "Welcome to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which was designed from its inception (September 1995) as a dynamic reference work. In a dynamic reference work, each entry is maintained and kept up to date by an expert or group of experts in the field. All entries and updates are refereed by the members of a distinguished Editorial Board before they are made public. Consequently, our dynamic reference work is responsive to new research. You can, however, cite fixed editions which are made on a quarterly basis and stored in our Archives. Thank you for your patience as our Encyclopedia develops." (Quote from opening page.) There are several dictionaries of philosophy in the reference collection that deal with various topics. They can be found in the B41 call number area. Internet sites below have links to philosophy dictionaries as well. A great browsing tool is to look at an outline of the Library of Congress Classification and find the area dealing with your topic and browse the online catalog or the shelves in that area. A great outline with links to the areas is available at: http://lcweb.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/lcco/lcco.html BASIC SOURCES FOR RESEARCH American Philosophical Association. APA Online http://www.apa.udel.edu/apa/ "The American Philosophical Association is the main professional organization for philosophers in the United States. Founded in 1900, its mission is to promote the exchange of ideas among philosophers, to encourage creative and scholarly activity in philosophy, to facilitate the professional work and teaching of philosophers, and to represent philosophy as a discipline." American Philosophical Association. APA Online. Web Resources, Guides to Philosophy http://www.apa.udel.edu/apa/asp/guides.asp Copleston, Frederick Charles. History of Philosophy (B72.C62 v.1-9) Education Index. Subject. Philosophy Resources http://www.educationindex.com/phil/ Kemerling, Garth. Philosophy Pages http://www.philosophypages.com/index.htm This is a good site with a lot of information and links to sources on philosophy. . "Though it does not openly declare itself, it is clear that this set of pages was developed by its author as an aid for teaching his own survey courses in the history of Western philosophy." (APA Newsletter, Volume 98, Number 1 (Fall, 1998)) Philosophy in Cyberspace http://www-personal.monash.edu.au/~dey/phil/ Site indexes thousands of philosophy resources and is annotated and updated regularly. World Wide Web Virtual Library : Philosophy http://www.bris.ac.uk/Depts/Philosophy/VL/ Writing for Philosophy Bedau, Hugo Adam. Thinking and Writing About Philosophy (B 52.7 .B43 1996) Feinberg, Joel. Doing Philosophy: a Guide to The Writing of Philosophy Papers (B 52.7 .F45 2002) Seech, Zachary. Writing Philosophy Papers. ( B 52.7 .S44 2004) Logic & Thinking Browne, M. Neil. Asking the Right Questions: a Guide to Critical Thinking (PN 83 .B785 1990) The two books below are available through the online NetLibrary collection. See the Library's web page. They may be searched quickly by using the ISBN numbers given here. Allen, Colin & Hand, Michael. Logic
Primer (e-Book ISBN: 0585391203) Gensler, Harry J. Introduction to
Logic (e-Book ISBN: 0203204883) University of Oxford. Introduction to Logic http://logic.philosophy.ox.ac.uk/main.htm This Web site provides, through a range of materials and tools, an introduction to the study of elementary logic covering propositional and predicate calculus. It is aimed especially at first year undergraduates studying Philosophy at the University of Oxford, but it is hoped that the site may be useful more widely, for anyone who would like to investigate the subject. For "elementary" text books on logic, browse the call number area BC 101+ in the Library's stacks or in the online catalog. Additional materials will be found in other parts of the BC classification dealing with various areas of logic, i.e. History of, Special topics: proof and error, fallacy, truth, dualism, etc. Additionally, the QA 8.9+ classification will have works on Mathematical Logic JOURNALS & SERIALS The use of journals will give you an idea of the research and philosophical thought that is taking place amongst scholars today. There are many periodicals in our collection that are philosophical in nature. To name just a few that would be of use to the beginner: American Philosophical Quarterly Many of our journals are also available online through our databases. From the main library web page click on any of the databases listed under Full Text Databases - try EBSCO and JSTOR as starting points. The databases listed under Citation Databases are indexes and abstracts that will point you to other sources. Suggestion... Need help? Ask a Librarian. Did you know... access to many of our journals and newspapers come through what are called aggregator databases; these are large, overwhelming collections of materials that have some kind of search engine attached. Most will have title listings that you can look at to see what is available and what the limitation of coverage is. For example, in EBSCO at the opening screen there is a title list available from the left hand menu of the page and also for each sub-area you choose to search in at the basic search page; in JSTOR you can expand the subject lists to look at individual titles or browse all titles. Many journals are also available directly on the Internet or provide archives and information. Once again... Learn how to evaluate the pages you are looking at! American Philosophical Association. APA Online. Journals http://www.apa.udel.edu/apa/asp/journals.asp An excellent starting point - journals that have been reviewed by the APA! One that may be of interest to beginning students of philosophy is: The Dualist - Undergraduate Journal of Philosophy http://www.stanford.edu/group/dualist/ "... is a publication dedicated to recognizing valuable undergraduate contributions in philosophy and to providing a medium for undergraduate discourse on topics of philosophical interest. It was created by students at Stanford University in 1994 and has since featured submissions from undergraduates around the world. The journal is published each spring and is distributed to philosophy departments across the nation." If you wish to look for other periodicals in our catalog that deal with subjects in an area try doing a KEYWORD or SUBJECT BROWSE search in the card catalog under the term you are looking for followed by the subdivision PERIODICALS. Example: philosophy periodicals. Need help? Ask a Librarian. More on searching later. SERIES We have several series of materials that are concerned with philosophy and philosophers. Below are a few examples that you can look at. Search in the catalog under the following or the individual titles or authors if known: Cambridge companion to ... [i.e.
Augustine] OF INTEREST AND MISCELLANEA University of Louisiana, Lafayette. Dept. of Philosophy. Why Study Philosophy? http://www.louisiana.edu/Academic/LiberalArts/PHIL/WhyStudyPhilosophy.html Check out the link "Philosophy Rocks the Graduate Records Exam." Least you think that philosophy is all work and no play, here are two sites that have philosophy jokes on them. Really! Philosophical Humor. David
Chalmers, comp.
http://www.u.arizona.edu/~chalmers/phil-humor.html SEARCHING THE ONLINE CATALOG Need help... Ask a Librarian for more help on searching our online catalog. Below are some tips and general information. Access to the Library's online catalog is done from the home page, click on "Library Catalog." Open the Library's web page http://spider.georgetowncollege.edu/library/ so you can access the catalog to try some of the searches below. At the search screen you can choose Simple Search or Builder Search. Simple Search Simple Search is a great starting point. At the main searching screen you will enter your term(s) in the
Find This: box Note: in the lower left hand corner you can establish how many records in the list you want to display at a time.. The options given in the Find Results In: menu basically revolve around Keyword or more exact searches. To Keyword or not to Keyword... keyword searching is kind of like using a shotgun to hit a target - you'll get it, and a lot of other things as well. It is frequently a good starting point if you don't know what you are looking for, but, you are going to wade through a lot of hits you did not want. Browse searches are still general in nature but they are more exact than keyword because they are usually associated with a particular type of search, i.e. Subject Browse or Call Number Browse. Your results will be more limited. The only exact search in this menu is the Left Anchored Title search, more on that below. When Keyword is associated with a search it will search all of the records or a part of all of the records in the database for any of those words. A general Keyword Relevance search will look at almost every field in a record. A Title Keyword search will look for your term(s) in every title field in the database. The results are displayed by a relevance ranking that rates the terms in where and how many times it appears in the record(s). A Keyword Relevance search on
philosophy returns 3657 hits (as of this date). The other searches tend to be browse searches that look in particular areas of the records in the database. These are very helpful in limiting a search by letting you browse in a particular area to get an overview. They are still not exact. Let's say you are looking for materials "about" philosophy. Try a Subject Browse search. Remember - a subject search will return materials about the terms you are searching for. This search will return you to the nearest place in the subject indexes that it can find and you can click on the number in the left column to see the title(s) associated with that term or scroll or go to next page to see more terms. Want to be more exact? Let us say you are looking for periodicals on philosophy. You could enter the terms philosophy p and you would jump to the subject terms under philosophy where all second terms begin with p. Try it. A little more exact than a keyword, but still general. Play with some of the other options available in the Find This In: box. A subject search can be used for names as well as terms. Do a Subject Browse search on Kant, Immanuel to find materials "about" Immanuel Kant. Do an Author Browse on Kant, Immanuel to find materials "by" Immanuel Kant. The results are very different. Hints: If you know the exact title: use the Left Anchored Title search. Do not put in initial articles (a, an, the, la, les, etc.) unless they are part of a proper name. Example: The sun also rises would be entered as Sun also rises. But, the title El Greco of Toledo would be input as it reads because El Greco is the artist's name. Try searching the same title with various keyword searches as opposed to a left anchored title and watch the search results. If you know the author: use the Author Browse last name, first. Truncation can be used for the many of the above searches. Example: Thomas Dionysius Clark can be entered as Clark, T if you are not sure of his full name. Or a left anchored title could be entered as gno if you were not sure if it began with Gnostic or gnosis. Truncation does not work well for keyword searches since it will look for the string anywhere in any part of a word, etc. It is better to use complete terms with keyword searches. Monster words are words that produce a lot of results. A keyword search on term introduction returns 4877 results, the keyword psychology 3877, music 5314 ... these terms are best combined with other terms or used in the Builder Search. Builder Search This search option is much more powerful, exact and gives you more options for combining and limiting terms within the drop-down boxes. It also gives you an extended Limits option which will allow you to limit by location in the library, material type, year(s), language, etc. Builder Search's drawback is that you need to become familiar with the relation of the terms in the various drop-down boxes and how they are used. Boolean searching is cool if it is used properly. The way searches are input is similar to the Simple Search above. Play with the various options and try some of the searches from above or create your own. Ask a Librarian for more help and instructions on how to use Builder Search or any of the features in our catalog.
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