1. «Private modern and contemporary philosophical
libraries» is
an initiative of a
research group at the Scuola Normale of Pisa in collaboration with the
University of Cagliari. The project is aimed at making available to
scholars an
on line data bank constituted by library catalogues and inventories
gathered
during the last four centuries. It will be possible to consult the
catalogues in
Pdf format or as link to existing computerized catalogues (the website
can be
consulted on: http://picus.sns.it/biblioteche_dei_filosofi).
It is possible to
reconstruct
the libraries of philosophers, and to proceed at the same time with an
inventory
of philosophical texts present in the libraries of men of letters and
sciences,
by gathering and publishing documents of different types: auction
catalogues
from the XV century onwards, which attest to the sale of collections of
books
and manuscripts of single scholars; inventories, generally compiled for
more
administrative reasons, on the occasion of donations or bequests upon
deaths;
bibliographic catalogues written by the owners themselves, or on their
behalf,
in order to publicise their own collections and display their value;
catalogues
of institutional libraries, drawn up in order to orient users wishing
to consult
the collected texts. Compared to genuine
bibliographic catalogues, which were drawn up in a systematic way and
completed
with often onerous editorial efforts, sale catalogues for collectors
and book
lovers had a quite different fortune and circulation. The brochures and
lists
printed by antique booksellers reached extraordinary levels of
circulation as
early as the XVI century, first in Holland and then in the rest of
Europe. They
often ended up being a chaotic and impenetrable “dark
forest” in
which it is difficult to find one’s way. In fact, these
catalogues were
often completely forgotten once the sale was over. Leibniz himself used
such
lists as bibliographic repertories.
The research will be extended also to less common sources, such as document
summaries and inventories of general libraries or sources, such as the livres de
raison, or “family books”. These are at the same
time domestic
registers and collections of various testimonies, in which it is
possible to
find records of family events and patrimony, together with materials of
quite
different nature. An
analysis of the philosophical literature located in
private libraries of
modern philosophers, scientists and scholars allows to enter a field of
research
which has been disregarded for a long time, but is now of ever – increasing
interest, as recent
publications of important libraries – for example those of Schelling and Nietzsche – demonstrate. These materials and
documents differ from one
another, but they all attest to the circulation of books and allow the
reconstruction of the “workshop” of the philosopher
or scholar. This
makes easier both a thorough investigation of the sources of a single
test and
the identification of the cultural background of philosophers and
scientists.
Such documents finally allow a more focussed analysis of the most
representative
works of an epoch or a given environment – what has sometimes
been defined
as the “literary canon” of an age, a specific
historical period or
geographic place -. The reconstruction of important
philosophical
libraries is not aimed at privileging the moment of the intellectual
biography
as in historiographical researchs. It neither offers material of mere
erudition.
Its aim is rather that of expanding the use of libraries in order to
make
philosophical and historiographical research easier and richer, always
taking
into account the role increasingly important played by researches on
history of
culture and history of ideas, or by the German "Begriffsgeschichte".
2. The
availability of catalogues of private libraries collected in various
countries
over the last four centuries could therefore be useful to that scholar
who
intends: to document the studies, fields of interest and competences of
an
author by working on a list of the author’s books; to
investigate the
circulation and the fortune of an author’s works by widening
the analysis
to the libraries of subsequent generations; to become familiar with the
intellectual features of an epoch; to study the history of the
transformations
of private libraries in the passage from one epoch to another, thus
contributing
to a kind of “sociology of library systems”; to
register the ways in
which knowledge systems and the reciprocal relations between different
disciplines can change (it could be interesting to explore how the
philosophical
texts present in the libraries of jurists, linguists, naturalists, etc.
evolve);
to follow the circulation of extraordinarily rare texts or collections
of texts.
In many cases, knowledge of private libraries allows the scholar to
rectify
threadbare interpretations and to remove an author from the
clichés of
manuals. Skimming the index of Dilthey’s library clarifies
the breadth and
articulation of a philosophical reflection assiduously dedicated – despite
the proclaimed
autonomy of the “humanities” – to
keeping alive the dialogue
with the natural science of the period. And again,
Nietzsche’s library
testifies, in the variety of collected texts and documented
interdisciplinary
interests, to an approach with the “patience of the
philologist”,
extraneous to the “cult of genius” in all its
forms. Such an
approach is closely connected to the evolution of both positive
knowledge and
many different scientific disciplines.
From
a historiographical point of view, significant reflections about the
issue do
appear only subsequently. When the season of the great Hegelian and
Neokantian
philosophic historiography seemed to draw to a conclusion, attention
moved to
legacies, unpublished materials and private libraries as well. In 1889
Wilhelm
Dilthey, willing to highlight “the unity of the history of
philosophy and
of the history of culture” suggested the systematic
institution of
“literary archives” to gather “plans,
sketches, projects and
letters” but also books owned and annotated by the
philosophers. The need asserted by Dilthey was insisted upon again by
other scholars
at the beginning of the 1900s.: Giovanni Gentile, for example, in his
preface to
the first edition of the Bibliography of Giordano
Bruno’s works by Virgilio Salvestrini (1926). Between the
end of the 1800s and
the first decades of the 1900s some very prestigious library catalogues
were
published: Galileo’s library by Favaro (Favaro 1886 and
1887),
Montaigne’s as reconstructed by Villey (1908), and that of
Pico as
proposed by Kibre (1936).
3. The
“reading” and the study of library collections must
be
“selective” in any event since the materials
catalogued are often
incomplete. For example, through the catalogue of the library of
Voltaire it is
certainly possible to trace decisive developments in modern philosophy:
“from the anti-Cartesian polemics of John Locke to the
reflection of
Shaftesbury on moral and sentiment, to the anti-dogmatism of John
Toland, Samuel
Clarke and Anthony Collins, up to the sceptical results of David
Hume’s
philosophy”. But a constant critical scrutiny of this
bibliographic
documentation is necessary, since in this specific case, the great
interest of
Voltaire for Newton’s work is not reflected in the catalogue
of the
library, where there are no volumes of Principia
mathematica.
The
database is open to the collaboration of all scholars who are
interested in the
aims of the research, and contributions are here explicitly solicited.
The
success of the initiative will in fact depend on the broadest possible
involvement of individual researchers and research centres, through the
addition
of bibliographic and library materials.