Field Work Proposal

This Spring Break I’ve been lucky enough to get the chance to travel to New York City for the break’s entirety. Being in New York City has given me the opportunity to explore many academic sites. Sadly my topic is on the study of ethics/history of the study of ethics, and New York City doesn’t have many historical areas that pertain to that topic. However, the New York City Public Library contains millions of items and is one of the largest in the world, so I plan on spending a few days there searching for and researching source material. I will update this post as soon as possible with my findings.

For my field work I visited the New York Public Library, which as stated above has around fifty three million unique books in storage. There were around two dozen books covering the history of western ethics, but I was only given the option to check out around a dozen for the day. The library was packed, of course, and I spent my time reading on the third story in a very large study hall with long granite tables. The books I checked out and read through were The Oxford Handbook of the History of Ethics, around fifteen hundred pages long, and Essays on the History of Ethics, which was only around two hundred and fifty pages long. I spent around five hours in the library, and I was able to read most of the essays in the latter, and get a basic understanding of 17th century ethics in Europe and Britain from the former. The books helped lay out an understanding of the importance of linguistics in ethics, as most of the philosophers and the essays about those philosophers dealt with the definitions and wordings of ethical terms, such as “morality” or “good” or “evil.” Sadly I was unable to spend as much time there as I wanted to, but I was able to pull very important pieces of information from my time spent studying there. Shown below is the two books I read through.