I’m writing to you today, to let you know about two new e-resources available to us here at Harvard.

The first is the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy Online.  I’ve had a number of requests to get electronic access to this resources, so I’m glad that we are finally able to offer it.

The second is the Cambridge Histories Online.  The most relevant ones for philosophy include:

• The Cambridge History of Hellenistic Philosophy
• The Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy
• The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy
• The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy
• The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy Vols. 1 & 2
• The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Philosophy, Vols. 1 & 2
• The Cambridge History of Philosophy 1870–1945

The full-text of the above books is available, in HTML or PDF format.

You’ll need your Harvard ID and PIN to access these resources.

Enjoy!

To get us started this week, here are two interesting pieces on technology.

Warning: shameless Firefox promotion!  Have you installed the latest version of the Firefox browser?  If not, here’s an article from PC Magazine, “Firefox 3: 8 Things You Didn’t Know You Could Do,” to pique your curiosity.

I know that I have a few fans of Zotero among my readership.  From Disruptive Library Technology Jester comes some troubling news: “George Mason University Sued by Thomson Reuters over Zotero.”  Stay tuned, readers, to see how this lawsuit plays out.

A hat-tip to “American Libraries Direct” for these links.

A quick administrative note: I will be out tomorrow, 3 October, for a bereavement day following a recent death in the family, and will not be posting again until Monday.

And now, for this week’s humor post: I was recently sent a link to Dinosaur Comics.  These are hilarious, with a strong philosophical bent.  Enjoy!

Yesterday, I received a very interesting question — a patron was curious to know two things:

1. Is there a way to directly import information from Philosopher’s Index into EndNote?
2. Does Harvard provide us with a connection filter for the Index as it does for the HOLLIS catalogue?

The answer to the first question is no — though it is actually fairly easy to import records from Philosopher’s Index into EndNote.  All that is required is to perform a few extra steps to make this happen.  (I’ll outline what you need to do, next.) At present, you can only directly import results from Philosopher’s Index into RefWorks.

To the second question, the answer is yes — Harvard does provide a connection filter for the Index, so you will be able to import the references you find in the Index into EndNote without having to do a lot of extra reformatting or data entry.

Here’s how to import references from Philosopher’s Index into EndNote.  I will pretend that I am looking for MW Barnes’ article, “Vulgarity,” to illustrate how to do this.

1. Login to Philosopher’s Index via HOLLIS, using your Harvard ID and PIN.
2. When you get to the Advanced Search page in Philosopher’s Index, enter “barnes” into the first row’s  first search box, and set the drop-down menu to “Author, AU =”; on the next line, enter in “vulgarity”, and set that drop-down menu to “Title, TI =”.  Click the Search button.  You should get the one result, listing the complete bibliographic information: M.W. Barnes, “Vulgarity,” Ethics 91(1), October 1980, 72-83. Check the box next to the reference.
3. Above the results, you should see a link named “Print/Save/E-mail.”  Click on that.
4. This screen should appear:
5. Set the first drop-down box to “Full Format.”  Then move down to the radio buttons next to the “Save” button, and choose the option for whatever operating system you are using.
6. Click on “Save,” and save the files as a text/notepad file to whatever location you chose.
7. Open EndNote, and open an existing library or create a new library.  (Obviously, make sure that you have EndNote installed on your computer first.)
8. Go to the File menu, and choose the “Import” option.  In the box that appears, click on the “Choose File” option and select the text/notepad file.  Then click on the “Import Option” button.  From that list, select “Philosopher’s Index (CSA).” This is the filter that Harvard provides to import references from Philosopher’s Index into EndNote such that you do not need to reformat the data or retype it all in.
9. If you do not see this option, click on the “Other Filters” option, which should be in bold typeface among the options.  Once you do that, you will get a very long alphabetical list of filters.  Scroll down this list until you see “Philosopher’s Index (CSA)” — highlight that, and click “Choose.”  This filter will now be one of your import options.
10. When you return to the Import Box, click on “Import,” at the bottom of the box, which should import the references directly.

I realize that what I’ve just outlined above may seem complicated at first, but, once you have the hang of using EndNote, it’s actually a fairly easy process to import references into the software.

I am very happy to demonstrate these steps in person, so please feel free to contact me to set up a training session.

Also, if you have other questions about using bibliographic management software, please let me know.  I’d be very happy to answer them.

After being part of a session on blogging by academic librarians last week, I’ve decided to experiment a bit with adding tags to posts.

I’ve started by converting the categories of individual philosophers to tags, along with a few others, and placing them in a tag cloud on the right-hand navigation.  The list of categories was getting too long, quite honestly, and I think the cloud will be a better way to locate posts on your favorite philosophers and other topics.

Please let me know what you think of this change.

Today, I’m writing to let you know about the contents of the newly-arrived issues of The Monist – Monist 91(1) January 2008 — and Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (PPR) — Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 77(2) September 2008. You can read the respective Tables of Contents for each issue by clicking on the links — please note that you’ll need your Harvard ID and PIN to access the Table of Contents for PPR

To access full-text of the articles, go to The Monist or to PPR.  You’ll need a Harvard ID and PIN to access the articles.  There appears to be a bit of a delay in getting articles from the Monist posted, so the current issue’s contents are not appearing at the moment.  I’m not sure when they will be posted, so you may want to keep checking back periodically to see if they have.

There has been a lot of press about the downsides of emerging technology, e.g., “Is Google Making Us Stupid?“  and The Googlization of Everything. (As you can see, a lot of this press is directed against Google, though not entirely.)

However, could there be an upside to this technology?  Damon Darlin thinks so, in “Technology Doesn’t Dumb Us Down.  It Frees Our Minds.”

What do you think, readers?  Granted that changes are occurring, some for the better, and some for the worse, what are you thoughts on this?

A hat-tip to the Rowland Institute’s Library News & Notes for this link.

Just arrived in Robbins: the latest issues of American Philosophical Quarterly and Erkenntnis.  A list of the Tables of Contents follows below.

American Philosophical Quarterly 45(2) October 2008 (This is not currently available electronically.)

• Orthogonality of Phenomenality and Content, Gottfried Vosgerau, Tobias Schlicht, and Albert Newen, 309-328
• Agent-Based Virtue Ethics and the Fundamentality of Virtue, Daniel C. Russell, 329-348
• “Designer Babies” and Harm to Supernumerary Embryos, Mark Walker, 348-364
• A Unified Pyrrhonian Resolution of the Toxin Problem, the Surprise Examination, and Newcomb’s Puzzle, Laurence Goldstein and Peter Cave, 365-376
• Response-Dependence of Concepts Is Not for Properties, Eyja M. Brynjarsdóttir, 377-386
• Personal Identity Un-Locke-ed, Andrew Naylor, 387-396

Erkenntnis 69(2) September 2008 (You will need your Harvard ID and PIN to access this issue.)

• Sortals for Dummies, John E. Sarnecki, 145-164
• Must Differences in Cognitive Value be Transparent?, Sanford Goldberg, 165-187
• Contrastivism Rather than Something Else? On the Limits of Epistemic Contrastivism, Peter Baumann, 189-200
• The Causal Chain Problem, Michael Baumgartner, 201-226
• The Logical Structure of International Trade Theory, Frieder Lempp, 227-242
• Is There a Simple Argument for Higher-Order Representation Theories of Awareness Consciousness?, Mikkel Gerken, 243-259
• Too Naturalist and Not Naturalist Enough: Reply to Horsten, Luca Incurvati, 261-274
• Review of Heather Dyke, Metaphysics and the Representational Fallacy, Kevin Dewan, 275-277

Human reason is a much-studied topic in philosophy.  I’ve always enjoyed this observation on the powers of human reason by Benjamin Franklin, from his Autobiography.

First, though a bit of context for the following anecdote.  The story occurs early in Franklin’s life, as he was fleeing indentured servitude and his brother in Boston on a Philadelphia-bound ship.  During the voyage, the ship was becalmed off Block Island.  Franklin spent time watching the crew supplement the food supply by fishing for cod.  At the time, Franklin was a vegetarian.  While observing the fishermen prepare the cod for supper, he has a witty insight into the powers of human reason:

I believe I have omitted mentioning that, in my first voyage from Boston, being becalm’d off Block Island, our people set about catching cod, and hauled up a great many. Hitherto I had stuck to my resolution of not eating animal food, and on this occasion consider’d, with my master Tryon, the taking every fish as a kind of unprovoked murder, since none of them had, or ever could do us any injury that might justify the slaughter. All this seemed very reasonable. But I had formerly been a great lover of fish, and, when this came hot out of the frying-pan, it smelt admirably well. I balanc’d some time between principle and inclination, till I recollected that, when the fish were opened, I saw smaller fish taken out of their stomachs; then thought I, “If you eat one another, I don’t see why we mayn’t eat you.” So I din’d upon cod very heartily, and continued to eat with other people, returning only now and then occasionally to a vegetable diet. So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do.

– Autobiography, Ch. 4

I’ve had several requests over the last few days about online guides to writing philosophy papers.  There are several sources to consider.

Last year, I wrote a post about the Harvard Center for Expository Writing’s Guide to Philosophical Writing. This is a great, in-depth guide on the mechanics of organizing and writing a philosophy paper.  You can obtain a paper copy from the Center directly, or you can access an electronic version on the Links page of the Department of Philosophy Web site, under the “Writing” section of Online Resources.*

Another well-regarded guide is Jim Pryor’s Guidelines on Writing a Philosophy Paper.

Finally, for writing resources in general — including dictionaries, thesauri, grammar handbooks, style guides, and writing habits — you may want to check out the Writing Resources page of the Department of Philosophy Web site.

Are there others to include on this list?

* Please note that, because of a bug in Acrobat Reader, some pages and graphics may be missing when you try to view the online version.  I have not been able to locate a fix for this bug at the present time.  If you find that pages and graphics are missing when you open the file, please e-mail me, and I will send you a copy.