This is a quick introduction to how to
use the Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy. The Stanford Encyclopedia is
one of two online encyclopedias of
philosophy that should be your first
resource when you are curious about a
philosophical topic or thinker and want
to begin to find out more. Its web
address is Plato.stanford.edu
I recommend that you bookmark it. Here is
the main landing page, and we will begin
by searching for "historicism." If I want
to know more about historicism in
philosophy, I find that there are 48
documents found, listed in relevance
order: historicist theories of
scientific rationality... then I can
find some thinkers associated with
historicism: Karl Popper, as a critic of
historicism, Rehberg, Ortega y Gasset,
Collingwood, "accused of historicism," Leo
Strauss, Croce, "absolute historicism," and
others. I can go in any of these
directions if I want to know more about
these thinkers, but I'll begin by reading
this "Historicist Theories of Scientific
Rationality" article. Here is the article
page. I have some navigation links on the
left side. The first thing to notice after
the title is the date of the last major
revision of this article: about two and a
half years ago. Below this is a several
paragraph long abstract of the article.
This should give me within a few minutes
a fairly quick understanding of what
kinds of things this article will
contain about understanding historicism
and learning more about it. This would
give me the information I need to decide
whether I want to go read the entire
article. Beneath this is a set of linked
contents to different sections of the
entry: paradigms, research programs,
traditions, general criticisms, and
neohistoricist developments. At the end of
the article is a bibliography. In many
ways this is the most valuable part of
any encyclopedia entry because it is
going to give you a relatively recent
list of relevant sources.
These are the sources that you should be
looking at to continue your study of
historicism or of any other thinker or
concept. As you can see these are often
quite detailed and include some very
recent work as well as some classical
work. So if I want to know more about
this, these are the articles that I would
go to and begin finding in my own online
library databases or through
interlibrary loan. At the bottom of the
article also we will find related
resources, and the name or names of the
authors, in this case Carl Matheson and
Justin Dallmann, with links to their
respective websites or professional
pages. Back up at the top of the page are two
more things I'd like to show you. First,
if we click the "author and citation info"
we will go to a different page which
will show us citation information for
this particular encyclopedia entry. And
here it is, if I needed to cut and paste
it into a bibliography. I myself would
recommend against citing encyclopedia
entries in a philosophy research paper.
It seems to me that this should be more
on the order of some background reading
for you rather than a source that you
would cite in a paper. I would recommend
that instead of citing an encyclopedia
article entry that you cite the
bibliographical sources at the bottom.
The other thing I want to show you is
the "friends PDF preview." If you wish to
get a PDF version of any particular
article to save or print out you can do
so by clicking that link. To view and
download the PDF you must become a
member of the Friends of the Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy Society.
Membership is five or ten dollars per
year and it may be worth it to support a
worthy cause, a database that all of us
can use for free but that is not free to
produce and maintain. So that is my quick
overview of how to use the Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy in your
own philosophical research. Goodbye.