Best practices for searching in Logos — for research on Greek philosophical influences on Christian

Patrick S.

I am researching into the influence of Ancient Greek philosophy (specifically the 'big three', Socrates, Plato & Aristotle) on Christian thought — from first century (NT writers) through to the Scholasticism of the Middle Ages.

I am looking at the best way, best practices, to do this in Logos — assuming a desktop (not subscribtion yet) Logos with an average library, but not wanting to necessarily have results limited to what is in my (current) library. That is, I am open to purchasing promising new books found in my searching.

My question is (and again this is a sort of best practices/how to question) what are all of the options available in Logos to achieve this? For example (and this obviously is not an exhaustive list — hence my reason for this post) I could think of the following:

1. Simple search by one or more keywords
2. Searching in the book library list
3. Factbook
4. Topic Guide
5. ?

Of course there is a wealth of information and books in Logos / my library, for example just doing the most fundamental search, "plato OR aristotle OR socrates OR philosophy AND theology", brings up a lot of books (downloaded and Cloud books) but does not show available (not purchased) books. 

If I do a Factbook search, for example, on "Biblical Interpretation" in the Factbook I see 'Recommended Reading' which includes books not owned and 'Bookstore'

If however I do a Factbook search "Greek Philosophy" I get very little returned, only one book from my library when obviously there are many more — for example hundreds returned in the simple search.

What would everyone recommend as the best way, which tools to use, to do such a topic based research.

John Fidel

Patrick,

I have a subscription and as a result smart search and smart search synopsis. I ran a search on all Logos books first since I do not have a lot of philosophy books in my library and got this with many spot on book selections.

Here is a list of books I do not own that would be helpful:

I then ran it on my books and got this:

I know you said you did not have a subscription and I will let someone else walk you through the many ways you can do a precise search, but I wanted to show you how effective the smart search feature can be, especially is starting your research and finding additional resources that may be impactful in your study. You may want to  try it for a month or so.

I hope someone provides you an answer using the precise search, Facebook and other tools.