My name is Carl Olson, Librarian for Philosophy & Religious Studies. If you need further assistance, please contact me by email at colson@towson.edu.
"We are too weak to discover the truth by reason alone..." (Saint Augustine of Hippo, 354-430, C.E.)
"Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest" (Denis Diderot, 1713-1784, C.E.).
“There is only one thing a philosopher can be relied upon to do, and that is to contradict other philosophers" (William James, 1842-1910, C.E.).
Research Emerges in a Climbing Cycle:
Students new to a topic benefit from skiing downward:
| Google: | Has power-search codes which can help bring desired results to the surface: |
| Plus sign (+) | requires words to appear: +triangle +Bermuda (Minus (-) excludes terms: Bermuda -triangle;) |
| Quotation Marks: | find Phrases: "Violence and the Sacred"; "Allegory of the Cave" |
| Asterisk (*) | finds nearby terms: Augustine * Nietzsche = "How would Nietzsche negate Saint Augustine?" |
| Filetype:file-extension: | finds: pdf, xlsx for Excel; ".pptx" for PowerPoints; ".docx" for Word |
| Intitle: | finds keywords in a web page's title tags: intitle:Deontology |
| Google Scholar: | finds articles accessible to TU, articles citing a source, cited by a source, or related articles. |
| Google Books: | can discover snippets of books, unknown books, or quoted books. |
