User's Guide to biblatex philosophy

© 2009–2014 Ivan Valbusa 2
Copyright notice
Copyright © 2009-2014 Ivan Valbusa. This package is author-maintained. Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or
modify this software under the terms of the LaTeX Project Public License, version 1.3c ora later (http://latex-project.
org/lppl). This software is provided ”as is”, without warranty of any kind, either expressed or implied, including, but
not limited to, the implied warranties of merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose.
A brief history
The firs step toward the creation of the philosophy-modern style was the request of Lorenzo Pantieri in the g u It
Forum: http://www.guit.sssup.it/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=6472. ∗ Now this is the bibliography style of L’arte
di scrivere con LATEX, the most popular Italian guide to LATEX (Pantieri and Gordini 2011).
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank who took part in the debate on g u It Web site and the authors of the styles which inspired
biblatex-philosophy, specifically: Dominik Waßenhoven (2011), James Clawson (2010) and Sander Gliboff (2010).
Feedback
If you have any questions, feedback or requests please email me. My mail address is at the top of this document. If you
need specific features not already implemented, remember to attach the example files.
1 Use
To ensure Italian-style quotation marks, you need to call the babel and csquotes packages in the preamble of your
LATEX document:
\usepackage[italian]{babel}
\usepackage[style=italian]{csquotes}
\usepackage[style=philosophy-〈style〉,backend=biber]{biblatex}
\addbibresource{〈bibfile〉.bib}
Replace 〈style〉 with classic, modern or verbose, and 〈bibfile〉 with the name of your bibliography file (“.bib” must be
declared). See the example files in the texmf-dist/doc/latex/biblatex-philosophy/examples.zip folder.
To uniform the style of quotation marks in multilingual bibliographies typeset using the babel=other package
option, you can use the following commands:
\DeclareQuoteAlias{italian}{french}
\DeclareQuoteAlias{italian}{german}
\DeclareQuoteAlias{italian}{...}
☞ The philosophy styles require biber so remember to configure your editor properly. If you prefer bibtex you have
to declare it with the backend=bibtex option but some bibliography drivers will not work properly.
2 Syles features
This package provides two author-year bibliography styles suitable for both text and footnotes citations (philosophy-classic
and philosophy-modern; henceforth classic e modern) and a verbose style appropriate for bibliographies supplied
in the footnotes (philosophy-verbose; henceforth verbose).
These styles aim to match the needs of the Italian writers, particularly those concerned in the humanities (for example
the comma is used to distinguish the units of the entry). Only the English and Italian support is available for now but
you can use the styles with all the languages supported by babel (or polyglossia) adding simple redefinitions in the
preamble of your document (section 6).
∗ See the discussion on http://www.guit.sssup.it/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=6717.
biblatex-philosophy v0.9f – 2014/03/28