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A Guide to Philosophy Resources

Guide to resources for the study of philosophy at Washington University in St. Louis.

Why This Research Guide?

"You will be required to write a 10–12-page term paper on a philosophical issue of your choosing related to the philosophy of action and referencing one or more of the papers that appear on the revised syllabus, though you may need to supplement those shared readings with additional readings" - Nic Koziolek (Michael Schaefer, ed.)

Reference Works - A Place to Begin

Oxford Bibliographies Online: Philosophy -  written and reviewed by academic experts, every article in this database is an authoritative guide to the current scholarship, containing original commentary and annotations. This online reference tool combines features of a high-level encyclopedia and of a traditional bibliography put together in a style that responds to the way people do research online. 

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy - nearly 1600 entries online...the SEP was designed so that each entry is maintained and kept up-to-date by an expert or group of experts in the field. All entries and substantive updates are refereed by the members of a distinguished editorial board before they are made public." Open access.

 

For other encyclopedias of philosophy, see Philosophy -- Encyclopedias subject heading. 

 

Catalog Searching

How comfortable are you with using the WUSTL Library catalog? Can you go beyond keyword? Have you used advanced search?

Academic Journal Article Databases

The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

PhilPapers is a comprehensive index and bibliography of philosophy maintained by the community of philosophers. They monitor all sources of research content in philosophy, including journals, books, open access archives, and personal pages maintained by academics. We also host the largest open access archive in philosophy. Their index currently contains 2,713,240 entries categorized in 5,845 categories. PhilPapers has over 310,000 registered users.

The full text content of philosophy journals is not stored in a single repository. PhilPapers is the most comprehensive index for citations, but you will find the content of philosophy papers in JSTOR, Academic Search Complete, as well as publisher's repositories like Cambridge, SAGE, etc. 

I recommend using PhilPapers to search for citations and Primo or Google Scholar to find the full text. 

Zotero

See the Zotero LibGuide