Spring, 2006

Here are some entry points into the secondary literature on these topics.  These can provide starting points for your literature reviews. However, they are starting points only! Many of the books I mention are now twenty or thirty years old; they are still valuable, but you should also look into the more recent literature.

General Sources

Index: There is one main index to the periodical literature in philosophy, namely The Philosopher's Index. This is now in an online version you can link from the library's home page. Searching is easy and on most topics will return a lot of stuff -- weed through it carefully, as some of it will be good and a lot will be so-so! If we have full-text access you can get it directly from the index (but there seems to be a "full text" link whether we actually have full-text access or not, so often you'll follow the link only to be disappointed).

Journals:  In my opinion, the most valuable journal literature on modern philosophy is in The Philosophical Review. (See the discussion of JSTOR and Poiesis under "Internet Resources" below.) This is a superb philosophy journal with highly competent, well-written, well-edited pieces.  Other journals likely to be particularly useful are History of Philosophy Quarterly and The Journal of the History of Philosophy. Sometimes The Journal of the History of Ideas also has interesting material.

Encyclopedias:  The classic source is The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Macmillan, 1967), which has substantial articles on all the figures covered in our course.  Although still valuable, this is now nearly forty years old.  A useful more recent encyclopedia is The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy.  The library has both; they also have a CD-ROM version of the Routledge encyclopedia which I believe can be accessed from computers in the reference area. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is still growing, but already contains multiple articles on all the philosophers covered in this course, ranging from two on Spinoza to nine on Kant (with more in the works).

Internet resources: At Trinity we have on-line full-text access to articles from the Philosophical Review as well as The Journal of Philosophy, Mind, and many other first-rate journals through JSTOR. There is a five-year embargo on articles, though, so for recent articles you need to look elsewhere. Another online index with full-text access to philosophical journals, including The Philosophical Review, Hume Studies, The Leibniz Review, and Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, is Poiesis. This source has only a one-year embargo, but unlike JSTOR, the articles are HTML versions rather than PDF reproductions of the actual journal pages.

Sources on Specific Philosophers

These are a little hit-or-miss:  things I happen to have or have run across. I haven't listed anything that doesn't look useful to me, but there's bound to be an awful lot of good material I haven't listed. 

Descartes:

Doney, Willis, ed.Descartes: A Collection of Critical Essays. New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1968.

Gaukroger, Stephen. Descartes: An Intellectual Biography. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. There's lots of philosophical stuff mixed in with the history here. And where else could you learn, for example, that Descartes' body was exhumed in Stockholm in 1666 to be moved to France, at which time his right forefinger was cut off by the French ambassador?

Hooker, Michael, ed. Descartes: Critical and Interpretive Essays. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978.

Kenny, Anthony. Descartes: A Study of his Philosophy. New York: Random House, 1968.

Williams, Bernard. Descartes: The Project of Pure Inquiry. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978. Hard going in places, but well-written and fascinating.

Wilson, Margaret Dauler. Descartes. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978. Quite difficult, but a goldmine of helpful quotations from a wide range of Descartes’s writings.

Spinoza:

Bennett, Jonathan. A Study of Spinoza's Ethics. Hackett, 1984. Relentlessly argumentative and extremely useful.

Garrett, Don. The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Good overviews of many areas of Spinoza's thought, including an essay on his metaphysics by Jonathan Bennett and one on his philosophy of mind by Michael Della Rocca.

Grene, Marjorie, ed. Spinoza: A Collection of Critical Essays. New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1973.

Hampshire, Stuart. Spinoza. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1951. Classic exposition of Spinoza’s philosophy for a general audience.

Kashap, S. Paul, ed. Studies in Spinoza: Critical and Interpretive Essays. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972.

Mandelbaum, Maurice, and Eugene Freeman, eds. Spinoza: Essays in Interpretation. LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1975.

Wolfson, Harry Austryn. The Philosophy of Spinoza. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1934. (Two volumes.) Spinoza in relation to medieval thought. There's a one-volume paperback reprint you can occasionally find in used bookstores.

Leibniz:

Frankfurt, Harry G., ed. Leibniz: A Collection of Critical Essays. New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1972. True, it's over thirty years old now, but contains a lot of classic and still useful essays.

Rescher, Nicholas. Leibniz: An Introduction to his Philosophy. Oxford: Blackwell, 1979. Clearly written overview.

Locke:

Mackie, J. L. Problems from Locke. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976. Not a commentary on Locke but an investigation of a number of the issues he raised.

Martin, C. B., and D. M. Armstrong, eds. Locke and Berkeley: A Collection of Critical Essays. New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1968.

Tipton, I. C., ed. Locke on Human Understanding: Selected Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.

Hume:

Smith, Norman Kemp. The Philosophy of David Hume. London: Macmillan [1941] 1964. A classic.

Stroud, Barry. Hume. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977. A good discussion of all of Hume’s philosophy.

Kant:

Gardner, Sebastian. Kant and the Critique of Pure Reason. London: Routledge, 1999. Comprehensive overview with discussion of recent scholarship. Includes a useful bibliographical essay.

Smith, Norman Kemp. A Commentary to Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason.” Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, [1923] 1962. Detailed commentary; can be extremely helpful.

Wolff, Robert Paul, ed. Kant: A Collection of Critical Essays. New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1967.

Ewing, A. C. A Short Commentary on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1938. Exactly what the title says. 

Wolff, Robert Paul. Kant’s Theory of Mental Activity. A detailed, often paragraph-by-paragraph commentary on some of the hardest parts of the Critique of Pure Reason, notably the “Transcendental Deduction.”