PHIL 300:
The Scottish Enlightenment: Hutcheson, Hume and Smith
Fall 2008 · Professor Alison McIntyre

Contents:

• Find background information
• Find books
• Find articles
• Find primary sources
• Find even more sources
• Evaluating what you find
• Relevant research guides

• Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy Online
• Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Encyclopedia of Ethics - Clapp Ref BJ63 .E45 2001
• Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment - Clapp B1402.E55 C36 2003
• Studies in the Philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment - Clapp B1402.E55 S88 1990

Use the Wellesley library catalog to find books, videos, and journals (not individual articles).

• if our copy is checked out, click on to the right of the title to request a book quickly from another library (2-4 days)
• Search WorldCat to find material we don’t own, click on and request through ILL (interlibrary loan)
• In a hurry? Get a BLC card and borrow the book directly from a nearby library

• Philosopher's Index 1940-present
• l'Annee Philologique 1969-2001
• Project MUSE - database of select academic journals in humanities & social sciences from the past 2-5 years
• JSTOR - journal articles in a broad range of disciplines; not most recent 2-5 years
• Academic Search Complete - articles from scholarly and popular sources, in many disciplines
• Find more databases on related research guides or on the Databases A - Z page

• Eighteenth Century Collections Online - Searchable and browsable page images of every significant title printed in the United Kingdom, along with thousands of important works from the Americas, between 1701 and 1800; includes books, pamphlets, broadsides, & ephemera.
• Wellesley College Special Collections - Original copies of many works from this period can be found in Wellesley's own Special Collections. These unique items are housed together on the 4th floor of Clapp, and they are all included in the main library catalog. You can search just Special Collections by changing your catalog search from "entire library" to "special collections" using the pull-down menu. Hours and staff contact information can be found here.

Find more sources

• In the library catalog, start with a keyword search to locate items on your topic, then use subject headings (under the Full Record tab in catalog records, included with article abstracts in some databases) to find other books on that topic.

• These subject headings may be useful in your research:
  • Philosophy, Scottish -- 18th century
  • Scotland -- Intellectual life -- 18th century
  • Enlightenment -- Scotland
  • Ethics Modern 18th Century
  • Hutcheson, Frances, 1694-1746
  • Hume, David, 1711-1776
  • Smith, Adam, 1723-1790

• Remember to use an author search to find books by a person and a subject search to find books on them, including critical analysis of their writings.
• Consult bibliographies or footnotes at the end of books and articles for more potentially useful sources
  

Critically evaluate what you find

Criteria to keep in mind when choosing and using sources:

• Accuracy - Does the author cite her/his sources and are they legitimate?
• Authority - Who wrote the source? Are they credible?
• Objectivity - Does the author have a bias, (political or commercial or persuasive)?
• Currency - Is this information new or based on outdated sources? Can you tell how current it is? How important is currency in this field?

Don't hesitate to ask me if you have trouble deciding whether or not to use a particular source!

• Philosophy Research Guide

Wellesley College Library • WCIS • Danielle Boulay • last modified: September 2, 2008