RICERCA ITALIANA     

Research program

The legacies of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche: archival texts, digital editions, and libraries.

University Co-ordinator

Università di PISA - LINGUISTICA - PISA(PI)

Research Unit Leader

Sandro BARBERA

Description

We are presenting the first part of a global project aiming to produce an electronic edition of the entire work of Arthur Schopenhauer, the edited as well as the posthumous work. The project forsees the collaboration of the Schopenhauer-Archiv in Frankfurt/Main (Dr. Jochen Stollberg), the Dean of the Schopenhauer-Gesellschaft (Prof. Matthias Koβler, also member of this part of the project-team), the Manuscripts Section of the Nationalbibliothek in Berlin (Dr. Eef A.Overgaauw, Dr. Jutta. Weber), the University of Pisa (Prof. Sandro Barbera, Dipartimento di Linguistica), the University of L'Aquila (Prof. Marco Segala, Dipartimento di Culture comparate), the University of Mainz (Prof. Matthias Koβler, Schopenhauer-Forschungsstelle), and finally, for electronic assistance, the "HyperNietzsche" group of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (Dr. Paolo D'Iorio). This research group has already extended and adapted to other authors the software platform, which had been originally elaborated for Nietzsche's manuscripts and work (see below: Piattaforma informatica). The global project comprehends three parts. The first one will be described below. The second section is part of the IRIS (Integrating Research Infrastructures in the humanities) project, which has been presented in March 2005 to the European Union. The third part will be presented to the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, Germany).
The first part of the project sees as its major goals:
a) To digitalize and publish on-line all of Schopenhauer's manuscripts of the years 1804-1818, which are included in the volumes XIX-XXII and XXIV-XXIX of the posthumous work in Berlin, for a total of 4,750 pages, for the most part having never been published before (see above). An agreement the National Library in Berlin (a member of the IRIS-project) shall be signed in May 2005, stating the conditions for our work to be realized in the rooms of the Manuscripts Section. This will permit the digitalization of the manuscripts and their publication on line.
b) To begin the transcription of Schopenhauer's notes, taken during his university years, which have never been published yet (volumes XIV-XXVII). The first notes shall be the ones taken during his courses of philosophy (Bouterwek, Schulze, Schleiermacher etc.).
c) To focus within the digitalized material the elements which permit the diplomatic transcription, and also the system of cross-references found by Schopenhauer, which has been only partially reproduced in the existing editions. This system is necessary to reconstruct the internal structure which Schopenhauer intended to give to his work in the various stages of its evolution. Schopenhauer's system of cross-references can be shown, thanks to the software in our possession, which can state and visualize the relations among single texts (see below). At this point will begin the true editorial work, for a part of the manuscripts also by means of a comparison between the solution found in Hochstetter's and Hübscher's editions.
d) To individuate in the volumes of Schopenhauer's library (held in Schopenhauer's Archive in Frankfurt/Main) his annotations written on the edges of the book pages (some of them very long and articulate). They probably go back to the years 1804-1818, thus constituting a decisive document in important moments of his philosophical evolution (for instance, the aforementioned annotations to Opnek'hat, the notes to Schelling's, Spinoza's, and Fichte's works, etc.). This work of individuation of the notes has to be done in order to digitalize them along with the texts they refer to. This way, these texts can be compared by means of the software in our possession with the other texts of Schopenhauer's posthumous work as well as with his published work. This project shall be realized in active collaboration with the Schopenhauer's Archive in Frankfurt/Main. Its Director, Dr. Jochen Stollberg, is reproducing on CD Schopenhauer's annotated volumes.
e) To support the results already achieved by our research on Schopenhauer's philosophical evolution, on the ground on the new acquisitions, coming from the transcriptions of his posthumous work. Therefore we are planning the organze a cycle of seminars in the various universities involved in the project (L'Aquila, Pisa, Padova, Mainz, Berlin, Frankfurt), in order to discuss with other scholars the results of the editorial work as well as the consequences of the editorial production for the history of philosophy and history of ideas.
f) To present the results of our research by means of both a traditional paper edition and an on-line magazine, which will be open to the collaboration of all interested scholars. This magazine is already made available by our software at no cost (http://www.hjournal.org/)

The informatic platform

A few notes on the informatic platform we intend to use: more information about its functions and its operating context is to be found at the end of the bibliography («Hyper»). The informatic support is made available for free by the University of Munich (apart from operational expences), in the framework of the HyperNietzsche project. The informatic software Hyper is the product of research made possible by the French CNRS, the French Office of Education, the German Office of Education, the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung, and the DFG.
Hyper is a web platform for humanities research. It permits the on-line publication of electronic texts, which can be more or less classified and accompanied by a search engine for key words or integral texts. Further, it is a hypertext system which permits the organization of texts and manuscripts of a single author according to chronological, genetic, and thematic criteria, and to activate a net of intersections among the primary sources, and between these and the secondary literature.
The most innovative and significant characteristic of Hyper is the automatic creation of bi-directional links. By publishing any material on the platform (the page of a printed text, a digitalized manuscript, a document of secondary literature), the author can point out any kind of relation between this new material and already published documents. Later, Hyper updates the data base in order to create the inverse link, describing the relation between the quoted document and the quoting one.
Finally, Hyper has a system of modules which are intended to facilitate the information management. For our research, the most interesting device is the module for the management and presentation of the transcriptions of manuscripts and work through the creation of XML files, which allow to be transformed at the same time in two different ways: the diplomatic transcription and the linear transcription.