The Temple University Libraries now offers electronic access to 80 Blackwell companions, guides, and dictionaries in the subject areas of philosophy (59 volumes) and religion (21 volumes), as part of Blackwell Reference Online. For a complete list of the philosophy and religion titles go here. These works offer great topic overviews and nicely complement the recently acquired Cambridge Companions. While Cambridge Companions predominantly focus on individual philosophers and theologians, Blackwell companions and guides focus on subject areas, i.e. epistemology, logic, religious ethics, political theology, etc.

Most of the titles in this collection are heavily used in print at Temple. Like the Cambridge Companions they are superb overviews written by prominent scholars, essential for faculty in unfamiliar disciplines, graduate students studying for classes and preliminary exams, and undergraduates researching papers. The searchable bibliographies take users right to the heart of current scholarship in a topic area. Like the Cambridge Companions, this electronic content will serve as excellent course material, most likely substituting in many instances for print texts.

There is quite a bit of overlap between Blackwell Reference Online and our print collection, but the print and the electronic versions of these works will likely be used in different ways. While the print versions are great for the focused study of individual topics, Blackwell Reference Online will allow users to search broadly over all the philosophy and religion volumes, discovering associations and linkages not apparent from the separate print volumes.

You can search Blackwell Reference Online using either the simple or advanced search. The simple search, which searches the full-text, offers post-search limiting by Subject, Place, Period, People, and Key Topics. It’s pretty slick, much like the way Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy does it. In the Advanced Search you can search authors, chapter titles, bibliographies, and full-text, as well as limiting to a particular book or subject area. You can also browse individual works. All results are presented as chapter titles or dictionary entries and are printable in full.

Another great source from the Temple University Libraries. Don’t wait. Start searching now!

—Fred Rowland

The Online Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (TLG) contains almost the whole corpus of Greek literature in full-text from the age of Homer through the fall of Byzantium in 1453 AD to the Ottoman Turks. This scholarly tool has very quickly become essential for studying Greek history, literature, and philosophy. Since its origins classical studies has been strongly influenced by language and linguistics. TLG allows researchers to examine Greek at both a broad and a fine-grained level. Scholars can effortlessly search across the database to look for word frequencies and unusual words, concepts and phrases, or they can examine just a single text. You can limit your search to specific centuries, use abbreviated subject and geographic categories, or search a selected group of texts. Using one of the many kinds of Greek fonts, you can not only retrieve texts but also input searches in Greek font. It’s very cool.

Imagine the riches this collection contains: the Presocratics with their focus on the natural world, the Platonic dialogues with their emphasis on ethics and morality, and Aristotle’s wide-ranging and multidimensional gaze. The Greek tragedians Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles. The writers of the Hellenistic period when Greek learning spread to most of the ancient Mediterranean and Middle Eastern worlds. The four gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, plus the Acts of the Apostles and the letters. Ancient Hebrew wisdom transmitted through the Septuagint, the Greek version of the Hebrew scriptures. And don’t forget the apocrypha, like the Gospel of Thomas, Epistle of Barnabas, and the Apocalypse of Daniel. Or the Greek Fathers, or the commentators on Aristotle like Alexander of Aphrodisias.

This is a great scholarly collection and the Temple University Libraries is happy to bring it to faculty, students, and staff.

—Fred Rowland