Friday, June 25, 2010
Thursday, June 24, 2010
Descartes stolen Letter 1643
Letter stolen by a 19th-century book thief had been gathering dust in a U.S. college.
The name Guglielmo Libri will mean little to anyone outside the inner circles of academia. But a mere mention of the 19th-century Tuscan noble and polymath to European scholars still has the power to provoke hand-wringing and despair.
Count Guglielmo Libri Carucci dalla Sommaja was more than a respected scientist and a decorated professor of mathematics. He was also — and more notoriously — a book thief, guilty of intellectual larceny on an international scale.
In the mid-1800s, Libri pilfered tens of thousands of precious manuscripts, tomes and documents from Italian and French libraries, including 72 letters written by the great French philosopher and mathematician Rene Descartes. Now, in an emotional ceremony, one of the letters has been handed back to France after collecting dust in a library at a small American college since 1902.
The letter, described as “a wonderful discovery for science”, is dated 27 May 1641 and concerns the publication of Descartes's treatise, Meditations on First Philosophy — subtitled In Which the Existence of God and the Immortality of the Soul Are Demonstrated — that year. It was written to Father Marin Mersenne, who was overseeing the book's publication.
Academics had known of the letter's existence for more than 300 years but not its contents as nobody, apart from a Haverford College undergraduate, had examined it. As scholars pore over the contents, its discovery has once more put Libri under the spotlight.
Born on January 1, 1803, in Florence, he was a precocious academic who, at the age of 20, was appointed professor of mathematical physics at Pisa, and had a fascination with ancient books and manuscripts. Threatened with arrest for his political activities, he fled to France, where he was elected to the French Academy of Sciences and awarded the Legion d'Honneur. His love and knowledge of books were recognised when he was appointed Inspector of Libraries, tasked with cataloguing valuable works. Instead of documenting them, however, he began stealing them.
Tipped off about his imminent arrest, Libri fled once more — to England, bringing with him around 30,000 books and manuscripts in 18 large trunks, including works by Galileo and Copernicus. Although found guilty of theft by a French court and sentenced in absentia to 10 years' in jail in 1850, Libri enjoyed the high life in London, funded by selling the stolen tomes.
He returned to Italy to die in 1868. Learning of his death, the French government requested the return of some of the manuscripts and offered to buy back those that had been sold. Some were returned, but tens of thousands of other precious stolen works simply disappeared.
The Descartes letter had been donated to Haverford, near Philadelphia, by the widow of an alumnus and remained in its library, unnoticed, until a philosophy scholar at Utrecht University in the Netherlands stumbled across a reference to it on the internet. He contacted the college, which immediately offered to return it to France. The French Institute plans to publish it in a collection later this year. — © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2010
Keywords: Descartes, history, philosophy
The name Guglielmo Libri will mean little to anyone outside the inner circles of academia. But a mere mention of the 19th-century Tuscan noble and polymath to European scholars still has the power to provoke hand-wringing and despair.
Count Guglielmo Libri Carucci dalla Sommaja was more than a respected scientist and a decorated professor of mathematics. He was also — and more notoriously — a book thief, guilty of intellectual larceny on an international scale.
In the mid-1800s, Libri pilfered tens of thousands of precious manuscripts, tomes and documents from Italian and French libraries, including 72 letters written by the great French philosopher and mathematician Rene Descartes. Now, in an emotional ceremony, one of the letters has been handed back to France after collecting dust in a library at a small American college since 1902.
The letter, described as “a wonderful discovery for science”, is dated 27 May 1641 and concerns the publication of Descartes's treatise, Meditations on First Philosophy — subtitled In Which the Existence of God and the Immortality of the Soul Are Demonstrated — that year. It was written to Father Marin Mersenne, who was overseeing the book's publication.
Academics had known of the letter's existence for more than 300 years but not its contents as nobody, apart from a Haverford College undergraduate, had examined it. As scholars pore over the contents, its discovery has once more put Libri under the spotlight.
Born on January 1, 1803, in Florence, he was a precocious academic who, at the age of 20, was appointed professor of mathematical physics at Pisa, and had a fascination with ancient books and manuscripts. Threatened with arrest for his political activities, he fled to France, where he was elected to the French Academy of Sciences and awarded the Legion d'Honneur. His love and knowledge of books were recognised when he was appointed Inspector of Libraries, tasked with cataloguing valuable works. Instead of documenting them, however, he began stealing them.
Tipped off about his imminent arrest, Libri fled once more — to England, bringing with him around 30,000 books and manuscripts in 18 large trunks, including works by Galileo and Copernicus. Although found guilty of theft by a French court and sentenced in absentia to 10 years' in jail in 1850, Libri enjoyed the high life in London, funded by selling the stolen tomes.
He returned to Italy to die in 1868. Learning of his death, the French government requested the return of some of the manuscripts and offered to buy back those that had been sold. Some were returned, but tens of thousands of other precious stolen works simply disappeared.
The Descartes letter had been donated to Haverford, near Philadelphia, by the widow of an alumnus and remained in its library, unnoticed, until a philosophy scholar at Utrecht University in the Netherlands stumbled across a reference to it on the internet. He contacted the college, which immediately offered to return it to France. The French Institute plans to publish it in a collection later this year. — © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2010
Keywords: Descartes, history, philosophy
Sunday, October 12, 2008
Saturday, October 11, 2008
Monday, October 6, 2008
Plato and Girard
This is the html version of the file http://www.preachingpeace.org/documents/Plato_Girard.pdf.
Google automatically generates html versions of documents as we crawl the web.
Google automatically generates html versions of documents as we crawl the web.
| Page 1 |
Sunday, October 5, 2008
Plato's concept of God
This is the html version of the file http://austinche.name/docs/god.pdf.
Google automatically generates html versions of documents as we crawl the web.
Google automatically generates html versions of documents as we crawl the web.
Thursday, August 21, 2008
Habermasian vs. Rawlsian deliberative democracy
Emancipation or accommodation?: 
The development of the theory of deliberative democracy has culminated in a synthesis between Rawlsian political liberalism and Habermasian critical theory. Taking the perspective of conceptions of freedom, this article argues that this synthesis is unfortunate and obscures some important differences between the two traditions. In particular, the idea of internal autonomy, which was an important, implicit idea in the ideology critique of the earlier Habermas, falls out of view. There is no room for this dimension of freedom in political liberalism and it has largely disappeared from the later Habermas. In so far as others have followed Rawls and Habermas, deliberative democratic theory has converged around a less critical and more accommodationist view of freedom. If we want to keep deliberative democracy as a critical theory of contemporary society, we should resist this convergence. Our starting point should not be `the fact of reasonable pluralism' but rather `the fact of unreflective acquiescence'. This article argues for incorporating internal autonomy in a complex theory of freedom to which deliberative democracy should be normatively committed.
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