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Albert S. Cook Library

TSEM102: The Limits of Reason (Tebben)

An Argument Centuries Old:

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.).

 

CYCLES OF KNOWLEDGE IN EVERY FIELD OF STUDY: "The sooner you start, the longer it's going to take!"

Building Up Knowledge

Research Emerges in a Climbing Cycle:

  • Primary Sources - Artifacts, documents, or results;
  • Secondary Sources - Articles, chapters, or books;
  • Tertiary Sources - Reference or subject encyclopedias;
  • Popular Sources - Rough introductions to what topics exist;

Students new to a topic benefit from skiing downward:

  • Popular | Reference | Articles, Books | Primary sources.

Popular Sources: "Good place to start, but a lousy place to finish."

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.

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