Dartmouth College Library
Collection Management & Development Program
Collection Development Policy
PHILOSOPHY
- COLLECTION AREA
- GENERAL PURPOSE
- DARTMOUTH COLLEGE PROGRAM
- GENERAL SUBJECT BOUNDARIES
- LANGUAGES
- GEOGRAPHIC AREAS
- TYPES OF MATERIALS COLLECTED
- FORMAT OF MATERIALS COLLECTED
- OTHER RESOURCES AVAILABLE
- CREATION DATE
- REVISION DATE
- LC CLASS
- BIBLIOGRAPHER
- COLLECTING INTENSITY CHART is located on a separate page.
Philosophy
The collection supports broad undergraduate instructional needs and the research needs of the faculty in all major areas of philosophy and the history of philosophy. The emphasis is on modern Western philosophy, but there are strong holdings in Ancient, Medieval, and Eastern philosophy. There is overlap with the interests of the Religion Department in philosophy of religion and in Eastern philosophy. Logic, philosophy of science, philosophy of language, ethics, epistemology, and phenomenology have been and will likely remain areas of strong interest. The philosophy of medicine, especially the ethical aspects, is becoming an area of interest to be shared with the Religion Department and the Medical School.
Although no graduate degrees are granted, the breadth and depth of the undergraduate program combine with the strong research interests of the faculty in all traditional areas to require that a research level of collection be maintained for most subjects. There are numerous advanced seminars and thesis programs available for undergraduates. Members of the faculty publish regularly at a high level. Moreover, publications which are technically labeled as philosophy cover such a wide range of subject areas that the collection is heavily used by the College community at large.
Almost everything acquired for philosophy is kept in Baker Library, and almost all of it falls into the Library of Congress B to BJ classifications. Holdings from pre-1964 are almost exclusively in the Dewey 100-199 classifications. (The BF and the 150-159 classifications are the exception, being reserved for Psychology.) Of course, for earlier works the distinction between Philosophy and Psychology, or between Philosophy and Natural Science or Theology was not neatly drawn and many early works supporting the Philosophy program are therefore scattered throughout the collection. There is overlap with the Mathematics Library for some aspects of logic, with the Physical Sciences Library for some aspects of the Philosophy of Science, and with the Dana Biomedical Library for some areas in the Philosophy of Medicine and Philosophy of Biology. The Sherman Art Library also shares an interest in the area of aesthetics. Within Baker there are minor overlaps with Religion, Psychology, and Language and Literature, e.g. Plato, Sartre, Derrida et al.
Historically we have collected in all major Western languages but not in Arabic or the languages of India and the Far East. (We have scattered holdings in the latter.) Important works of scholarship and primary sources are still collected in all Western languages, but there is a decided de-emphasis on modern works in any language except English. There are no particular geographic limitations.
Publication in philosophy is almost entirely in books and serials, the latter being particularly important for this discipline. Bibliographies, biographies, and histories related to the study of philosophy are extensively collected. Apart from the language limitations cited above there would be little material related to philosophy that would be excluded.
Although mostly confined to the traditional format of books and serials, publication in philosophy is beginning to see new directions in the microform Philosophy Archives for original publication and the online Dialog database for citation retrieval. Philosophy texts in machine-readable format are becoming more widely available, and these resources are being collected as appropriate.
Except for a small collection of books by and about George Santayana, there are no materials specifically related to collection development in philosophy.
March 1981 (William S. Moran)
February 1991 (William Fontaine)
B, BC, BD, BH, BJ
William Fontaine
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Last updated February 18, 1999 by: CMDC@Dartmouth.Edu (jdh)