Category Archives: Human Sciences

Call for Submissions: Comparative Feminist Philosophy

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Liberating Traditions: Essays in Feminist Comparative Philosophy Edited by: Ashby Butnor and Jen McWeeny Feminist comparative philosophy is the practice of integrating feminist and non-Western philosophical traditions in an innovative way, while still being mindful of the unique particularity of each, in order to envision and enact a more liberatory world. East-West comparative philosophy and feminist philosophy already share much in terms of methodology: a hermeneutic of openness and respect for difference, a crossing of philosophical boundaries and traditions, a rejection of the dichotomy of theory and practice, and the pursuit of new ways of looking at the world. In this volume, we seek to show how bringing diverse philosophical traditions into dialogue with each other can provide fresh insights on questions of specific interest to feminists and global theorists generally. Comparative themes may include, but are by no means limited to:

  • Theories of Embodiment, Gender, or Personhood
  • The Hermeneutics of Cross-Cultural/Cross-World Dialogue
  • Philosophical Practice & Marginalization
  • The Phenomenology of Liberatory and/or Spiritual Practice
  • Philosophical Responses to Globalization, Imperialism, and De-Colonization
  • Intersectional Selves: Culture, Race,Tradition, Sexuality, etc.
  • Embodied Epistemologies
  • Conceptions of Moral Agents & Actions
  • Theories of Emotion
  • Persons, Communities, and the State
  • Liberatory Aesthetics
  • Comparative Metaphysics
  • Pathways to Liberation

We seek any philosophical papers that engage the intersection of feminist and non- Western philosophies. Although the collection will primarily consist of comparative essays involving Asian traditions, such as Indian philosophy, Chinese philosophy, or Japanese philosophy, we also invite submissions that address North/South comparative philosophy, including African, Latin American, and indigenous philosophies. Abstract Deadline (500 words): March 1, 2008 Completed Paper Deadline: July 1, 2008 Preliminary selection based on abstracts. Final selection based on completed papers (20-25 pgs. total). E-mail submissions and inquiries to both ashby.butnor@gmail.com or jmcsweeny@jsu.edu.

Renaissance of Latin–Go Latin!

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Article on Slate about the Renaissance of Latin: why a dead language is becoming so popular. Thanks to Robin Mitchell-Boyask for pointing this out. ————————————————————————————————————– Subject Guides Classics // Islamic Studies // Jewish Studies // Philosophy // Religion ————————————————————————————————————–

New Titles Added to JSTOR and CREDO Reference

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Some great new titles added to JSTOR Arts and Sciences Collection, including Arabica (from Brill), 1954-2001; Culture, Health, and Sexuality (Taylor and Francis), 1999-2003; Gender and Development (Taylor and Francis) 1993-2003; Iran and the Caucasus (Brill), 1997-2001; and Women’s Review of Books (Old City Publishing), 1983-2003. Here’s the full list. Remember that you can look up any Temple journals on Journal Finder. Here’s a list of new titles from CREDO Reference. CREDO is a large of collection of relatively small (usually one volume) reference works. I’d use this for traditional-type reference questions, people, places, dates, events, definitions and stuff like that. ————————————————————————————————————– Subject Guides Classics // Islamic Studies // Jewish Studies // Philosophy // Religion ————————————————————————————————————–

Improvements to ATLA Religion Database

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Some great news about ATLA, the primary database for religious studies. Now, instead of full-text external links to ATLASerials on the American Theological Library Association web site, the full-text PDF’s are available from within EBSCO, making this database much more user-friendly. The linking arrangement between EBSCO’s ATLA and ATLASerials was always a klunky affair: the links were hard to spot within the ATLA results lists and records, the full-text was difficult to navigate once you got there, and printing was annoying as well. This change should make use of ATLA much more efficient and enjoyable. Take a look! Fred ————————————————————————————————————– Subject Guides Classics // Islamic Studies // Jewish Studies // Philosophy // Religion ————————————————————————————————————–

Philosophy Retrospective Buying Project

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Just finished going through the philosophy books published by the major American university presses between 1990-1999 to try to fill in books we did not currently own. Ended up ordering 126 books from the 1990’s that should be nice additions to our collection. To do this I searched 2016 books from WorldCat, a huge amount of work that left my wrists aching. If you’re interested, take a look at the list here:.

Films for the religious and philosophical

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Started i n1997, The Journal of Religion and Film is an open access journal that provides articles, movie reviews, and book reviews on religion (loosely construed) and film. Most of the films discussed are feature films, few documentaries. Philosophical Films “is a non-profit resource for philosophy teachers who want to incorporate films into their classes.” Here are some links to content from these two sources. Check them out. Fight Club: an exploration of Buddhism Using “Homemade” Documentary Video in Religious Studies Visions of the End: Secular Apocalypse in Recent Hollywood Film Memento The Corporation Mindwalk Fred

RLG Databases are gone

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In the past year OCLC and RLG, two very large database vendors, merged. The RLG Catalog is being merged with OCLC’s WorldCat and has been removed from our database lists. The RLG platform is fading away. All the databases that it supported will move to OCLC or other companies. Anthropology Plus and History of Science, Technology, and Medicine will now be available on the OCLC platform and Francis will move onto the CSA Illumina Platform. If you haven’t used any of the databases on CSA Illumina, like Philosopher’s Index,, Index Islamicus, and Sociological Abstracts, give them a try. It’s a nice interface and allows searching across multiple databases in broad subject areas (Arts and Humanities, , Natural Sciences, Social Sciences, and Technology).

Use Google Scholar to Find Full-Text @ TU

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Google Scholar has become a useful search tool because it allows you to search across the content of many different databases, including JSTOR, Project MUSE, Blackwell Synergy, Cambridge Journals Online, SpringerLink, HighWire Press, Journals@Ovid Full Text, Sage Journals Online, ScienceDirect, and many more. That is not to say that the entire content of these databases is available through Google Scholar (which has never released a complete list of its sources or the extent of its coverage) but at least some of it is there. Google Scholar also includes books from Google Book Search in its search results. Up till now, one of the problems with Google Scholar for Temple students, faculty, and staff has been the difficulty in retrieving the full-text of articles. You might find a juicy article in Google Scholar but after clicking on the link get a message that the article is blocked, even for many databases that you know Temple subscribes to. Well, this process has just gotten a whole lot easier. Now Temple has registered its TUlink service with Google Scholar, which means that you can link directly from Google Scholar into the library’s subscription databases. Look for Find Full-Text @ TU right after the article title and click on it. You will see the TUlink interface pop up with links for full-text if we have it online or in print, or a link to Temple’s Interlibrary Loan Form if we don’t. From within any of Temple’s campuses, links to Find Full-Text @ TUwill appear automatically. From off-campus you need to do one of two things:

  1. Just click HERE and it will automatically set your Google Scholar preferences for Find Full-Text @ TU, or
  • Go into the preferences of Google Scholar and select Temple University from LIbrary LInks.

You will find that Google Scholar is a nice addition to your research toolkit. Including it when researching a subject often brings some unusual and unexpected results. Set up your Find Full-Text @ TU preference and give it a whirl. Find Full-Text @ TU will NOT appear for books. For books, click on the link to Library Search at the bottom of the citation. This will take you to the record of the book in WorldCat.org, where you can input a local zip code (Temple’s is 19122) to find a local library with the book. You can set your Google Scholar preferences to use Refworks as your citation manager. In Google Scholar Preferences, just select Refworks as the Bibliography Manager. –Fred Rowland

Index of Christian Art

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The library now has The Index of Christian Art, the result of a project begun by Professor Charles Rufus Morey at Princeton University in 1917. He believed that the development of Early Christian art could be more deeply understood through the study of themes rather than artistic styles, which during the Greco-Roman period were too “uniform” (more information on the ICA). From a humble beginning of a few shoe boxes of index cards he crafted an indexing system which today falls under five broad thematic groups, Figures, Scenes, Nature, Objects, and Miscellany. The current online database covers all additions to the collection since 1991 when digitization began and thirty percent of the items indexed before 1991. It grows yearly and the retrospective digitization will eventually bring all pre-1991 content into the database. In addition to indexing Christian art, the database contains over 60,000 images both in color and black and white. For those who need to examine content that has not been digitized, they can still go to Princeton, Washington, DC, Los Angeles, Utrecht, or the Vatican to view the entire collection. The Index of Christian Art includes works of art from the early years of Christianity up through 1400 AD and recently the decision was made to expand the coverage up through the sixteenth century. The Index of Christian Art contains three different record types, which are called “databases” or simply “bases”: Work of Art records (over 57,000), Subject records (over 28,000), and Bibliographic records (over 57,000). The Work of Art records provide detailed descriptions and links to the images. Although there are multiple ways to search and browse, I found it confusing for the novice user (myself) since it’s often hard to distinguish between the actual record types and the individual fields in the records, especially when constructing a search and interpreting the results. I trust that greater knowledge of Early Christian art and more familiarity with the database would ease this burden a little (if not, feel free to let me know). The new user should start with the Multi-Base search because it lets you search across all fields and you can select which record type you’d like to search. Your results are unambiguous: if you search Work of Art records (or Subject or Bibliography records) you’ll get just that type of record in the results set. Index of Christian Art is a nice addition to our other art bibliographic and image databases, which can be found on the Arts & Humanities database list. Feel free to contact me with any questions. —Fred Rowland