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 have been hoping that one of the new reference works online would finally have a selection of materials on literary criticism and theory, and I’m glad to see that “literature” is one of the major divisions in this work. It’s already been helpful. Thanks for making it available. BTW I’ve been checking out the Blackwell too, which has a number of good volumes in it for literature students but they take some serious reading, like the “Companion to–” series. These are really books. So if you can subscribe to that, do, but I really like being able to reference the philosophers as they matter to literary theory.