PHIL 150: Mind, Meaning, and Morality (Fall 2024)

Start with your topic question or statement.
Identify key terms.
Databases are not good at "natural language," and rely on keywords connected with AND OR NOT.

Examples
TOPIC: Philosophy as the “love of wisdom” and its connections to

• Wisdom as more than mere knowledge of facts (self-knowledge and epistemic humility)
• Love and self-control
• Rhetoric (pursuing truth vs. aiming merely to persuade)

I might start with Philosophy AND Wisdom AND Rhetoric

TOPIC: Whether the soul is material or immaterial, and Whether death is bad for the person who dies

I might try soul AND immaterial AND death (in Phil Index) 

or maybe death AND "immaterial soul"

Let's test it out and explore the databases:

Morality and sexual orientation

NOTE:

If you find an article in PhilPapers that isn't full text, search it in the main library catalog to access -- DON'T buy it from the publisher website.

As noted above, you're going to need special characters and functions to run your searches. These include:
AND OR NOT
*
()
""

AND connects two terms. Kant AND "moral luck" will only return results with both Kant AND "moral luck"
OR will return one or the other. Kant OR Mill will return materials about either Kant or Mill.
NOT will exclude results containing that term. "personal identity" NOT Locke will exclude materials related to Locke.
* covers all endings of a term. Locke* will cover Locke, Locke's, Lockean. Caution: it will also return results for lockers, locked, and lockets
" "  forces the system to search for the terms as a phrase. A search for moral luck will return any article with moral OR luck. A search for "moral luck" will only return results with the full phrase "moral luck"
() Isolates these terms within a search, like in a Maths equation. Works best with OR commands. A search for "Moral Luck" AND (Locke OR Mill) will return all articles about Locke and Moral Luck, or about Mill and Moral Luck.

AND, * , and "" are going to be vitally important!