All content in this website is copyright ©The Philosophical Society of England. This does not mean to say you absolutely cannot copy anything on this site; it's just that there are conditions. Please see the link below for the terms. Creative Commons Licence This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Fair use

Naturally, you have rights to use our material under internationally accepted exceptions or limitations to do with Fair Use or Fair Dealing without reference to our licence. But to clarify, we mean by fair use or fair dealing the following:
  • Whether the usage is “transformative.” That is, whether it adds new expression or meaning to the original, or whether it merely copies from the original. Copying is considered fair, but transforming is not, especially where it might misrepresent.
  • Borrowing small bits of material from an original work is more likely to be considered fair use than borrowing large portions, but using the “heart” of the work might not. The way around this is for you to use it by all means, also to use it under the terms of the license quoting the relevant attributions, (see above link). Also, if you plan to use a whole article as opposed to an extract, then asking first is best, (see contact link below). The chances are that we'll be very pleased to see you do that, in any case.
  • Where using content on this website is done commercially, which is allowed, any uses that harm the copyright owner’s ability to profit from his or her original work are unlikely to be thought of by us as constituting a fair use. Additionally if by some miracle you would like to parody anything on this website for commercial profit, then we are not against that in principle, either; however, do advise you to contact us first, (see below link for contact).

Ways in which you can quote us in a web page

  • Just copy a sentence or small paragraph that makes the point you wish to include in your article and wrap it in a 'blockquote' HMTL tag to make it identified as a “quote” from someone else.
  • We are more than happy for you to include a link in the article or blockquote back to the original source on this website. If you want to link to an article without quoting from it, just add the link to your original content recommending the article by title or a link around some appropriate keyword, or some such.
  • You might have difficulty in copying our journal and embedded text articles, but linking to the page itself is fine. If you cannot get the text and yet still wish to do so, then do contact us for it, (see below for the contact link).
  • Try not to quote us outside of context, so do build upon your extract with original content before or after any blockquote to explain why that article is important to read and how it influenced you or makes your point, etc.

Contact us

If in any doubt over our terms, we welcome your contact if you would like to ask permission to use or reprint any content on this website.