The Project Vox team hopes everyone is remaining safe amid the coronavirus outbreak and its consequences in our daily life. As educators move their instruction online in response to efforts to contain the outbreak, many vendors have responded by making their previously restricted materials freely available to the public for a limited time. Project Vox, as a publisher of educational content by a team of students and educators, aspires to assist our audience in any way we can. In these uncertain times, we hope that providing a “bird’s eye view” of philosophy resources online can help with transitioning to online teaching.
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Below, we have curated a variety of online materials that can be used to teach philosophy, including historical images that reify the lives of women philosophers. We hope you find these useful. Please share with others!
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Temporary Resources
The following content has been recently released or curated in order to meet new demands for online teaching and research as well as to support coronavirus research and response.
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Several crowd-sourced lists of openly accessible publications and repositories are now freely available:
- A list compiled by the Society of College, National, and University Libraries (SCONUL) with statements from providers and more specifics about access.
- A list started by Anthony Sinnott, Access & Procurement Manager at University of York, in an index format of all the vendors with lifted restrictions.
- A list compiled by the academic online community of United Kingdom with short descriptions of what is available in each site.
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Some highlights of the resources described in these lists above, with links directly to the relevant page:
- Internet Archive has created the National Emergency Library, a collection of over a million texts not previously available, in order to support remote teaching.
- Many major repositories and publishers have opened access to their content, including Cengage, JSTOR, ProjectMUSE, ProQuest, SAGE, and Wiley.
- Many university presses, including Duke, Cambridge, Harvard, Michigan, MIT, Ohio State, and University of California, have made some or all of their publications freely available for a limited time, most commonly for 90-days from mid-March.
- Other university presses have made their some or all of their content available on ProjectMUSE, including Johns Hopkins, Nebraska, North Carolina, Temple, and Vanderbilt.
- Societies and associations, such as American Medical Association and Royal Society Publishing, removed access control on their publications as well for a limited time.
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For more discipline-specific content:
Philosophy
- DailyNous has a comment thread calling for pedagogically helpful articles and other media, from a post by Justin Weinberg (USC). There are 20 contributions as of March 27, 2020.
- This spreadsheet lists over 200 video-recorded philosophy classes and lectures, populated by Liz Jackson (ANU) and Tyson Goldschmidt (Rochester). These are made available for use during the coronavirus crisis.
- DailyNous has created a spreadsheet indexing virtual philosophy conferences.
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Art History
- USA Today wrote on several museums that partnered with Google Arts & Culture to offer virtual tours and online viewings of their holdings, including National Gallery of Art, Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Museum of Modern Art (New York), and Museum of Fine Arts (Boston).
- Ultimate Guide to Virtual Museum Resources, E-Learning, and Online Collections by MCN includes portals, virtual tours, online exhibits, e-learning resources, online collections, digital archives, and digital libraries.
- Index of Medieval Art by Princeton University Press is a database of medieval art that has made openly accessible until June.
- National Museum of Women in the Arts launched their online collection and exhibits on their website.
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Permanent Resources
The following content is always openly available for researchers and educators.
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Guides and Libraries
- For your further convenience, here is Duke Library’s guide to “Freely Available Databases and Search Tools,” created by Cheryl Thomas of Duke Libraries.
- The Internet Archive is an always openly accessible library of digitized and digital content, from books to datasets to web pages.
- HathiTrust Digital Library provides access to digitized books for member institutions as well as guests.
- British Library provides access to high-resolution digitizations of maps, manuscripts, and more on their digital collections page.
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Philosophy
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is a popular database of over a thousand philosophical entries of journal–article quality, maintained by Edward Zalta (Stanford).
- OpenCulture includes thousands of philosophical texts, videos, and films, and continually updates with news on newly accessible content.
- Wireless Philosophy (Wi Phi) produces introductory videos to many philosophers and concepts via YouTube, including ones on Émilie du Châtelet.
- Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Philosophers publishes introductory entries on philosophers across time periods and geographical regions, including ones typically neglected by mainstream Anglophone classrooms.
- Querelle, a project by New Narratives co-leader Marguerite Deslauriers (McGill), offers introductory entries and translations of feminist texts by early modern figures.
- Women Intellectuals of 18th Century Germany offers short entries and bibliographies of works by women philosophers of 18th century Germany.
- History of Philosophy without Any Gaps hosts an extensive number of podcasts that cover both mainstream and non-mainstream topics in philosophy.
- Philosopher’s Imprint is an open-access philosophy journal founded by Stephen Darwall (Yale) and J. David Velleman (NYU).
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For a much more extensive list of philosophy content available online, please see the American Philosophical Association’s catalog of resources.
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Art History
Philosopher entries on the Project Vox site include images that reify the lives and works of early modern women philosophers. Below, we highlight some of the organizations who have allowed us to use their images in our site and whose online collections may be helpful to others in teaching and studying the history of philosophy.
- National Portrait Gallery has a database of its portraits available for viewing online.
- The Met Collection has a database of its artworks available for viewing online.
- The Met Publications is another resource by The Metropolitan Museum of Art but with fully digitized art history books.
- Museum Martena allows viewings of many artworks by and related to Anna Maria van Schurman, our upcoming figure. The website is in Dutch.
- Smarthistory is a collaboration of more than 300 art historians, archaeologists, curators and academics who want to make the highest-quality art history resources freely available to a global audience.
- Timeline of Art History by The Metropolitan Museum of Art Heilbrunn hosts a catalog of essays and works of art as well as a chronology.
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Project Vox
As an open educational resource, we also want to draw attention to some of our own content that we hope will help our audience with teaching philosophy online.
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- Entries: As many of you already know, we offer in-depth entries on early modern women philosophers, with introductions to their life and works, and resources for research and teaching such as bibliographies and correspondence guides.
- Mary Astell
- Margaret Cavendish
- Émilie du Châtelet
- Anne Conway
- Princess Elisabeth
- Damaris Masham
- Anna Maria van Schurman will be coming very soon in April! Here are some “Revealing Voices” blog posts about her (1, 2, 3) while you wait.
- Timeline: We also maintain an interactive visual timeline of early modern history of philosophy. It includes major biographical and philosophical events, and seeks to contextualize the lives and works of women philosophers among their more traditionally renowned contemporaries.
- Videos (Part 1 & Part 2): We partnered with Wireless Philosophy to create introductory videos to Émilie du Châtelet, narrated by Andrew Janiak (Duke).
- Zotero: We populated our Zotero library, an open-access digital bibliography, with citations for sources we used for our own research and of interest to our audience.
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We hope you find this list helpful. If you know of a resource that is not on this list, please feel free to contact us (projectvox@duke.edu) with suggestions.
