New Electronic Resources: March 2007 Archives

Hello All,

Great news: we now have the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy Online! It's available from the All Databases list.

REP has both superb content and an equally superb interface. There is also supplemental content online that is not in the print volumes. To give just one example of the excellent documentation in this reference source, the bibliographies of major philosophers give the authoritative editions of the authors' works, both in the original language and in English translation.

Coverage of this encyclopedia is very broad and skips over many disciplinary boundaries. To provide just a few examples, there are articles on Augustine, Martin Luther, Maimonides, Ibn Sina, and Confucius that would be of interest to students of religion. There are articles on ethics, business ethics, and journalistic ethics. If your interest is literature there are articles on katharsis, mimesis, poetry, tragedy, and literature and philosophy. For social scientists, there are articles on the history of the philosophy of the social sciences, the philosophy of the social sciences, and on prediction in the social sciences. For historians, there are articles on the philosophy of history and on Chinese theories of the philosophy of history.

Key Features (from REP web site)

• 2,000 original entries from a team of over 1,300 of the world's most respected scholars and philosophers
• Covers an unparalleled breadth of subject matter, including Anglo-American, ethical and political, cross-cultural, interdisciplinary, continental and contemporary philosophy
• Over 25,000 hot-linked cross-references between articles and new links to other editorially reviewed websites
• An invaluable resource for all levels of users - students and general readers gain a rapid orientation with accessible summaries at the beginning of every in-depth article
• Regularly upgraded with new material, revisions, and bibliographic updates, REP provides access to the latest scholarship and major developments in philosophical inquiry worldwide

Also, don't forget about philosophy encyclopedias on Gale Virtual Reference Library: Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and the New Dictionary of the History of Ideas.

---Fred Rowland

I am very pleased to announce that Cambridge Collections Online (CCO) is available. Featuring the highly regarded Cambridge Companions, CCO is currently comprised of 144 Cambridge Companions to Literature and Classics and 93 Cambridge Companions to Philosophy, Religion, and Culture, with new volumes added each year. The material covers authors, like Augustine, Maimonides, and Hemingway, and topics, like American Modernism, Crime Fiction, and Arabic Philosophy. Cambridge Companions have become essential to faculty and students who want good general introductions and overviews of subjects in the humanities.

Each volume features contributions from major scholars in their respective fields. Take the Cambridge Companion to Ancient Greek Law as an example. Of the twenty authors who contributed chapters, seventeen had at least one book in Temple’s library catalog from a major university press (and in most cases several). CCO will prove useful to undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty. Faculty will use it to study areas outside their specialties, to help prepare for lectures, and to assign to students as course material. Graduate students will use it to write papers and to prepare for preliminary exams (Temple offers masters and PhD degrees in English, Philosophy, and Religion, to name just a few of the relevant degrees). Finally, undergraduates will use it to write papers and to study for tests.

CCO is available from the All Databases list on the library homepage. Check it out today!

---Fred Rowland