I just got my hands on Benjamin Rand’s 1905 Bibliography of Philosophy, Psychology, and Cognate Subjects. Rand lists roughly 60,000 books, articles, and reviews that were available in his time, and provides nearly exhaustive coverage of the nineteenth-century literature.
Rand’s Bibliography will be crucial for us as we expand our dataset backwards. How we’ll parse the vagaries of the citations is anyone’s guess at the moment. There will be more to come on that once we finish up 20C dissertations and appointments.
For the moment, I wanted to share few paragraphs from his Preface that express the same spirit as Phylo over a century earlier:
Information concerning philosophical literature has heretofore been scattered among such a great variety of sources that much expenditure of time and effort has been required before it became available. A comprehensive bibliography of philosophy has therefore long seemed a necessity. To form a single serviceable bibliography[,] the literature in various philosophical publications of recent years and the vast array of dispersed data of earlier periods needed to be brought together. To accomplish this task has been the aim of the present work.
. . . Notwithstanding the many years thus devoted to the work, more time might doubtless have been spent on it in point of completeness and thoroughness; but there is a limit to what can be fairly expected of single-handed and self-supported endeavour. The constant desire, however, has been to afford judicious and ready access to philosophical literature alike to student, librarian, and teacher. Whether this end has been satisfactorily accomplished can best be determined by the measure in which the work shall prove helpful in revealing the valuable sources of information in the realm of Philosophy, and by the extent to which it shall serve as a vantage ground from which to carry forward independent philosophical research.
. . .
If it happens in the coming years that students of philosophy in different lands shall first turn here for the sources of information, and, without retracing the steps already laboriously trod, shall proceed more readily with their own original researches, then this work will indeed have served a useful end. That it shall give readiness of access to the works of the ‘great ones’ in philosophy, and shall render available to all, the literature on those systematic subjects with which philosophical writers have dealt; that it shall furnish the means through which libraries of philosophy may more readily be founded or enlarged; shall prepare the way whereby new philosophers may more freely advance and new systems be created; that it shall testify to the intellectual brotherhood of man by true service toward all—are hopes which have stimulated to constant effort and lightened toilsome hours in the preparation of this work. If in spite of the work’s limitations any of these purposes shall hereafter be fulfilled, the end sought by the author will have been reached and his true reward have been attained.
It took Rand over a decade to finish his Bibliography. Let’s hope Phylo goes a little quicker!
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