The author of this instructional website has made every effort to ensure the accuracy of the information herein. Neither DeSales University nor its agents and representatives are responsible for its contents. They cannot accept any liability for any loss or damage resulting from the use of the material contained herein. The information is believed to be correct, but no liability can be accepted for any inaccuracies. Unless otherwise indicated, the names of people, institutions, businesses, and organizations mentioned in the assignments or exercises presented in the pages on this website are intended to be fictitious. Any resemblance to actual entities is therefore purely coincidental and not intended.
The WEB is no substitute for a comprehensive research effort. First, it is incomplete! Second, it contains more junk than not! Vast, and metastasizing, as it is, the WEB is not a reliable research base for the serious student. You should and may still have to make use of the resources of a "brick" library. Everything you need is probably not just a "click" or so away.
If you are writing an essay or term paper for a course, you must still make use of reliable bibliographic research indexes, e.g., The Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature. Web-based search engines, even those which are subject-specific, are no substitute for a systematic search of the literature in a standard research index. Moreover, you may still have to "manually" access one or more of your sources. If you are lucky enough to have full electronic access from your PC to that and all of the other necessary searchable databases, including full-text as well as abstracts, you are very lucky indeed! Most of us do not have such access.
The following links fall into two broad catgories: Academic Sites & Non-academic Sites. Keeping track of the crucial differences between the two requires some care. It can also make a difference in the creditability of what you produce using them. The following guidelines may help. In any case, follow your instructor's guidance as well.
The academic sites are the work of professionally trained philosophers and their graduate students. These sites usually have .edu or .ac or .cc addresses. But they can also be .net & .org sites. The academic sites are the most reliable sources of information, though as you follow links and get farther away from the "source" site, you may come upon stuff which no professional philosopher or academic scholar would enorse. There are also some undergraduate "academic" sites. These are not always reliable sources of information since they can and do reflect individual, non-professional, and often idiosyncratic interests.
Delving into the non-academic sites sites requires even more care. These sites usually have .com addresses. But they can also be .net & .org sites. So check the academic credentials of both the sites author and the professional creditability of any of the other linked sites before using its content.
Finally, the historically different conceptions of "philosophy" have benn intrinsically controversial among professional philosophers - What philosophy should be - How it should be done - What should count as a creditable contribution! There have always been severe, even if now somewhat mitigated, differences between "Anglophone" & "Continental" philosophers. But these are also contentious issues within those two loosely collective academic sectors. While this site includes links and resources from both the "analytical" & the "phenomenological" perspectives, it does have a distinctively Anglo-American orientation. Accordingly you may have to be sensitive to the orientation of one or the other in the preparation of a particular class assignment.
Do not forget to cite the WWW source for all the sites you use. This is a moral obligation for paraphrased as well as for quoted material. Your instructor will provide you with a standard format for doing this.
Prudence is also a factor here. You risk receiving a failing grade for academic dishonesty. And the risk gets higher every day. Your instructor always has a means of checking the Web to determine if you have plagiarized someone else's content. All it takes is the use of a sophisticated search engine like HotBot to scan the Web for a suspiciously "professional" or otherwise revealing turn of phrase which has slipped into a student's work from some uncited source. And the "test for plagiarism becomes even easier if s/he requires you to turn in your work on a diskette along with the hard copy so that it can be scanned using a program designed for just that purpose. If you "napster" someone else's ideas, the consequences may be rather severe.
If any of this site's links do not work please notify me by e-mail as soon as possible. I will either redirect or delete "broken" links. Such disconnects are inevitable as pages are either closed down or relocated by their authors or the host sites.
Neither De Sales University, the host institution for this instructional site, nor Jonathan Matas, its author, is responsible for the content of any linked site not on a web server of DeSales University nor for the content of any linked sites beyond it. If you choose to leave this site for other sites on the World Wide Web, you do so with the understanding that the outside linked sites contain content not endorsed by either DeSales University or Jonathan Matas, and that you have made an informed decision to proceed.