For quite a few years already (I’ve been using it myself since 2005, but I know it's been on for longer), Peter King (Toronto) has been maintaining and expanding an open-access collection of philosophical texts in Latin. It has been an invaluable resource for me and many others working (mostly) on medieval philosophy, so it seemed like a good idea to let NewAPPS readers know of its existence. The authors covered are: Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Apuleius, Porphyry, Augustine, Boethius, Cassiodorus, Calcidius, Eriugena, Anselm, Abelard, Gilbert of Poitiers, Grosseteste, Richard Rufus, Bonaventure, Aquinas, Scotus, Ockham, Buridan, Cajetan, Descartes, Hobbes.
Here are King’s ‘legal notes’ on the project:
A few legal notes. The proper holder of copyright in a work is the author of that work: Anselm as the author of the Proslogion would be its copyright holder, although this work, like everything else here, has long since become part of the public domain.
Well, if not the Proslogion itself, what about the edition? It is an established principle of copyright law that the maker of an edition of a text can claim copyright only in features that are unique or particular to that edition; in practice, this means the editorial apparatus and notes, which have been systematically removed from the texts given here. Hence they are not encumbered by copyright. But even if they were, it is not illegal here in Canada to post them. On Wednesday, 31 March 2004, the Federal Court of Canada handed down a ruling on the fair use of copyrighted material on the Internet. As part of his 31-page ruling, Judge Konrad von Finckenstein declared: "The mere fact of placing a copy on a shared directory in a computer where that copy can be accessed... does not amount to distribution," and hence not to copyright violation: see his decision here.
These texts are provided to allow scholars to perform research, and in particular to facilitate computer searches of their content. They are pure ASCII files. I have done some minimal efforts at standardization to make such searches possible (using classical orthography for instance). Please be sure to acknowledge the editors who have put long hours into preparing these texts. Of course, you will need to consult their editions anyway for their editorial apparatus. These texts are no substitute for the real thing. Use them with proper respect for their authors and their editors, who stand behind them.
Initiatives such as this (as well as similar initiatives, such as Early Modern Texts) deserve to be highly and regularly praised. I know Peter is not much of a reader of blogs (he had managed to remain oblivious to the whole Synthese affair until late May, having then had the misfortune of being informed of it by me…), but let me say ‘ thank you’ to him here anyway, for making such a fantastic resource available to all.
UPDATE: In comments, some well-informe readers mention a few more sites offering open access to a wealth of philosophical texts:
Logic Museum (translations into English)
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