Philosophy  Tags: philosophy  

Begin with your Subject guide.

Your lecturers have provided you with a selection of comprehensive and highly relevant reading resources. They have specifically chosen the most relevant resources from a vast body of literature to ensure that you are using the most appropriate texts.

These readings are usually organised by weekly lecture topics. Use the library catalogue to locate these items.

Keyword Searching

Before you start searching you need to:

• Determine the key concepts - Your research topic/essay question will help you identify the major concepts and keywords. e.g. Animal rights, Ethics, Human- Animal relations

• Define your search terms – When searching for keywords be ready to use a wide range of terms, both general and precise. For example: 

  • Geographical names - Africa, Asia, Chinese, etc.

  • Time elements - Classical, Modern, 18th century etc.

  • Category or Style - bioethics, metaphysics, existentialism etc

  • Philosopher - Descartes, Heidegger, Hobbes, Aristotle etc.

  • Add additional concepts - society, women, music, racism, etc

• If you have trouble identifying your keywords and concepts use a dictionary or encyclopedia  to find relevant terms
• Use quotation marks around two or more words to search as a phrase e.g. "philosophy of mind" or "chinese philosophy"
• You can truncate words to pick up plurals or variants on a word e.g. philos* will search for philosophical, philosophy, philosopher etc.
• Limit your search results to specific formats, publication dates and locations.
• Each catalogue record for an item contains hypertext links to alternate related subjects/topics.

Subject Searching

Use material in the Reference collections to find definitions of unfamiliar terms, summaries of topics or as a starting point for information. The following are just some of the major reference sources available: