Mit dem «Catalogue raisonné» von Oskar Wulff: „Altchristliche und mittelalterliche Bildwerke“ (1909 bzw. 1911) war die Erforschung und Präsentation der in den Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin gesammelten einschlägigen Kunst seinerzeit mit einem Schlage in die vorderste Reihe wissenschaftlicher Kataloge in Europa gerückt worden. Abgesehen von einer Neubearbeitung durch Wolfgang Fritz Volbach (1950) ist entsprechend Umfassendes für die ehemalige „Frühchristlich-Byzantinische Sammlung“ der Berliner Museen seither nicht wieder geleistet worden. Mit dem beträchtlichen zeitlichen Abstand zu den älteren Katalogen erscheint es verständlich (...) und begrüßenswert, wenn – nach der Zusammenführung der seit 1945 zwischen Ost und West geteilten musealen Bestände – eine neue Bestandsaufnahme unternommen wird. Das anspruchsvolle, dem Geleitwort von Arne Effenberger zufolge auf 10 Bände (mit Unterteilungen) angelegte Vorhaben verspricht noch umfassender und auf seine Art vorbildlich zu werden, wie es die Kataloge von Wulff waren. Inzwischen ist ein erster Teil von Band 1 über die Textiliensammlung erschienen. Wie dieser ist auch der 2. Band über „Werke der Alltagskultur“ auf mehrere Teilbände angelegt, deren eben erschienener erster Part ausschließlich den sog. Menasampullen gewidmet ist. Es handelt sich dabei um die bekannten Pilgerandenken aus dem unweit Alexandria in der Mariotis gelegenen Wüstenheiligtum des hl. Menas. Es geht freilich nicht um die erste Bearbeitung dieser kleinformatigen, auch von Privatsammlern hochgeschätzten Objekte: es sei verwiesen auf ältere Arbeiten von C.M. Kaufmann, dem Ausgräber von Abu Mina, sowie aus jüngster Zeit auf die Veröffentlichungen von C. Metzger zu den Sammlungen des Louvre (1981) und G. Kaminski-Menssen zu den Beständen des Liebieg-Hauses in Frankfurt (1997). Berlin nimmt mit 63 Menas-Ampullen immerhin einen bedeutenden Platz ein. (shrink)

The José Guadalupe Posada Collection of the Ibero‐American Institute, Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation – a Case Study on Digitization and its Impacts on the Work in Libraries. Digitization in a broader sense and digitization of printed cultural heritage especially have brought about many changes regarding the tasks and responsabilities of research librarians. New ways of thinking and acting are required as the objects and their mobile and connective qualities come into focus. These alterations stand in such contrast to the traditional (...) ‘librarian’, that the concept of the ‘embedded librarian’ has arisen. A digitization project completed recently at the Ibero‐American Institute in Berlin will serve as an example to shed some light on this new phenomenon of librarianship. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:David Hume to Alexander Dick: A New Letter Heiner Klemme Hume's letter to the well-known physician and sometime President of the Edinburgh Royal College of Physicians, Sir Alexander Dick (formerlyCunningham)(1703-1785),1 belongs toa series ofinteresting letters written by philosophers and historians of the Scottish Enlightenment to be found in the autograph-collection of the German chemist and historian of science Ludwig Darmstaedter (1846-1927). Although a catalogue has been published which lists (...) the items ofhis collection in 1909, some of its autographs have not been noticed by scholars. The only hitherto known letter from Hume to Dick was written in August 1760. However, Hume mentions Dick once in a letter of 1762. Although the letter of 1771 listed below does not contribute in any specific way to our knowledge of their relationship, it might be of general interest to students ofHume.?. Staatsbibliothek Preußischer Kulturbesitz Berlin (West) Signature: Sammlung Darmstaedter, 2a 1748 (1) [Address:] To Sir Alexander Dick Bar1 Dear Sir This will be deliverdtoyoubyMrPanton,5 whogoes offthe Endof this Week, to New York. I have us'd the Freedom ofintroducing him to you, both as he is a young Man of Merit, and as I thought it probable you might take the Oppertunity of writing to your Friend, Mr Smith, by so good ahand. Ifyou do, I shoudbegofyou to recommend the young Gentlemen to his Acquaintance; and you may safely mention him as a Man of Letters and a Man of Character. He is to settle in New York, and it is impossible but he must get acquainted with Mr Smith; but a Recommendation from so good an Authority as Yours, wou'd serve to Volume XVI Number 2 87 HEINER KLEMME [crossedout: probably]forwardtheirgood Correspondence, andconnect them much sooner with each other. I am Dear Sir Your most obedient and most humble EdinburghServant 18 of March 1771David Hume Philipps-Universität Marburg, F.R.G. 1.For details ofhis life and work see Leslie Stephen, ed., Dictionary ofNational Biography, Vol. 15 (London, 1888), 14a-14b. 2.Ludwig Darmstaedter, Verzeichnis der Autographensammlung (Berlin, 1909), esp. 167. The collection includes the very firstletter Hume wrote in March 1755 to Andrew Strahan, his printer. See my "'And Time does Justice to All the World': Ein unveröffentlichter Brief von David Hume an William Strahan," Journal of the History of Philosophy, forthcoming. Two further letters of Adam Smith to Thomas Cadell are to be published in Archiv für Geschichte derPhilosophie. 3.See R. Klibansky and E. C. Mossner, eds., New letters ofDavid Hume (Oxford, 1954; reprint, New York, 1983), 58-64. 4.See New Letters (above,?. 3), 68. 5.I have not been able to verify the identity ofthis person nor ofthe Mr. Smith mentioned below. 88Hume Studies... (shrink)

Die Gedanken des folgenden Vortrags wurden erstmals am 11. November 1981 im Otto-Braun-Saal der Staatsbibliothek Preu6ischer Kulturbesitz in Berlin vorge­ tragen. Mit diesem Vortrag wurde eine Ausstellung eroffnet, in der die Staatsbiblio­ thek Preu6ischer Kulturbesitz Berlin zusammen mit dem Goethe-Museum Dussel­ dorf (Anton-und-Katharina-Kippenberg-Stiftung) und dem Hegel-Archiv der Ruhr-Universitat Bochum im Rahmen des sog. "Preu6en-Jahres" des 150. Todes­ 1 tages Hegels gedachte. Der Vortrag wurde in erweiterter und veranderter Form in der Rheinisch-Westfalischen Akademie der Wissenschaften am 20. (...) Januar 1982 gehalten - am Tage der Eroffnung der genannten Ausstellung im Goethe-Museum Dusseldorf. An der Diskussion beteiligten sich die Herren Walter Biemel, Heinz Gollwitzer, Walter Hinck, Georg Kauffmann, Clemens Menze, Detlef Muller, Klaus Wolfgang Niemoller, Ernst Vollrath. Die Diskussionsbeitrage brachten wichtige Prazisierungen, die ich aufzunehmen suche; zum Teil fuhrten die Erorte­ rungen aber auch zu F ragestellungen, deren Themen uber den Vortrag weit hinaus­ gehen und der Ausarbeitung bedurfen - zur Frage nach dem Verhaltnis zwischen Hegel und dem Kunsthistoriker Rumohr, nach der Wirkung Wilhelms von Hum­ boldt und der Hegelianer auf padagogischem Feld, nach dem Verhaltnis zwischen Preu6en und dem Reich im spateren 19. Jahrhundert, nach den kulturpolitischen Bemuhungen von heute. Ich habe zuerst versucht, diesen Vortrag weiter auszuarbeiten, dabei genaue Belege fur das Dargestellte zu geben und auch die vorliegende Literatur aufzuarbei­ ten. Diesen Versuch habe ich schlie61ich aufgegeben. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:David Hume to Alexander Dick: A New Letter Heiner Klemme Hume's letter to the well-known physician and sometime President of the Edinburgh Royal College of Physicians, Sir Alexander Dick (formerlyCunningham)(1703-1785),1 belongs toa series ofinteresting letters written by philosophers and historians of the Scottish Enlightenment to be found in the autograph-collection of the German chemist and historian of science Ludwig Darmstaedter (1846-1927). Although a catalogue has been published which lists (...) the items ofhis collection in 1909, some of its autographs have not been noticed by scholars. The only hitherto known letter from Hume to Dick was written in August 1760. However, Hume mentions Dick once in a letter of 1762. Although the letter of 1771 listed below does not contribute in any specific way to our knowledge of their relationship, it might be of general interest to students ofHume.?. Staatsbibliothek Preußischer Kulturbesitz Berlin (West) Signature: Sammlung Darmstaedter, 2a 1748 (1) [Address:] To Sir Alexander Dick Bar1 Dear Sir This will be deliverdtoyoubyMrPanton,5 whogoes offthe Endof this Week, to New York. I have us'd the Freedom ofintroducing him to you, both as he is a young Man of Merit, and as I thought it probable you might take the Oppertunity of writing to your Friend, Mr Smith, by so good ahand. Ifyou do, I shoudbegofyou to recommend the young Gentlemen to his Acquaintance; and you may safely mention him as a Man of Letters and a Man of Character. He is to settle in New York, and it is impossible but he must get acquainted with Mr Smith; but a Recommendation from so good an Authority as Yours, wou'd serve to Volume XVI Number 2 87 HEINER KLEMME [crossedout: probably]forwardtheirgood Correspondence, andconnect them much sooner with each other. I am Dear Sir Your most obedient and most humble EdinburghServant 18 of March 1771David Hume Philipps-Universität Marburg, F.R.G. 1.For details ofhis life and work see Leslie Stephen, ed., Dictionary ofNational Biography, Vol. 15 (London, 1888), 14a-14b. 2.Ludwig Darmstaedter, Verzeichnis der Autographensammlung (Berlin, 1909), esp. 167. The collection includes the very firstletter Hume wrote in March 1755 to Andrew Strahan, his printer. See my "'And Time does Justice to All the World': Ein unveröffentlichter Brief von David Hume an William Strahan," Journal of the History of Philosophy, forthcoming. Two further letters of Adam Smith to Thomas Cadell are to be published in Archiv für Geschichte derPhilosophie. 3.See R. Klibansky and E. C. Mossner, eds., New letters ofDavid Hume (Oxford, 1954; reprint, New York, 1983), 58-64. 4.See New Letters (above,?. 3), 68. 5.I have not been able to verify the identity ofthis person nor ofthe Mr. Smith mentioned below. 88Hume Studies... (shrink)

We provide a detailed description of an interleaved and heavily annotated copy of Florae Berolinensis Prodromus, a flora of Berlin published by the German apothecary and botanist Karl Ludwig Willdenow in 1787, which today is preserved at the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz. We demonstrate that this is the copy that the author himself used and carried with him during his botanical excursions in and around Berlin to prepare a second edition of the work. (...) By analyzing this document as paper technology, we reveal that even seemingly trifling aspects of its material organization enabled far-reaching biological research agendas that were not originally intended. The hybrid form of manuscript and printed book, used in field excursions, enabled a kind of natural-historical observation that was at once detailed and bound by strict convention, a combination that inadvertently opened new research questions and suggested new objects of research. We thereby contribute to an understanding of the history of natural history that goes beyond the history of ideas and the intended uses of techniques, giving an example of how routine work on paper within a scientific tradition could generate innovation. (shrink)

Mendelssohn's disagreement with Kant's definition survived on a two-sided Folio sheet (Statsbibliothek zu Berlin, Preuss. Kulturbesitz:, Nachlass 162, D I.4.). The dispute relates to Kant's inaugural lecture in Königsberg (August 1770): "De mundi sensibilis atque intelligibilis forma et principiis". A copy was immediately delivered to Mendelssohn by Kant's and Mendelssohn's mutual disciple, Marcus Herz. From Herz's long letter-report we know of a four-hour long discussion concerning Mendelssohn's intention to contrast Kant's definition of 'Raum' and 'Zeit' with that by (...) Leibniz. Apparently Mendelssohn's objection was never concluded or in print, hence, the _Kritik der reinen Vernunft (1781) still retains the interpretation that Mendelssohn's contested in 1770. (shrink)

Dans le cadre de nos recherches sur la correspondance de Descartes, nous avons découvert une lettre inédite du philosophe. La lettre, qui se trouve à la Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Preußischer Kulturbesitz, est addressee à Joachim de Wicquefort, datée de Leyde, le 2 octobre 1640. Dans sa lettre Descartes réclame, par l' intermédiaire de Wicquefort, la traduction latine de ses Meteores, qui avait été remis au professeur de philosophie d'Amsterdam, Caspar Barlaeus. Elle précède de trois jours la lettre, (...) déjà connue, à Wicquefort sur le même sujet. L'importance de notre lettre est qu'elle confirme certaines hypothèses concernant l'édition latine du Discours, et le projet abandonné de la publication des objections faites au Discours et aux Essais et des réponses du philosophe. (shrink)

In this paper, three fragments of Dietrich of Freiberg's treatises are reported and analyzed from a philological point of view. The first one, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin - Preußischer Kulturbesitz,...

The Erfurtensis , now lat. 2°.252 in the Staatsbibliothek Preuβischer Kulturbesitz at Berlin , was assembled by Wibald of Corvey in the mid twelfth century, and is the most comprehensive medieval manuscript of Cicero, containing nearly half of what was eventually to survive. The manuscript as it exists today has lost one or more folios at several different points, but in some of these places readings were recorded by sixteenth and seventeenth-century scholars before the mutilations occurred. There is, (...) however, only one lacuna where early collations survive and where, also, E is a manuscript of primary importance for the reconstruction of the text. The omission in question, caused by the removal of folios at some unknown date between the beginning of the seventeenth century and the early nineteenth century, comprises the end of pro Caecina and virtually all pro Sulla . No readings are known to have been taken from the end of pro Caecina, but from the bulk of pro Sulla, before the manuscript as we have it resumes, a sizeable number of readings has fortunately been preserved. The tradition of pro Sulla takes the form of two branches, one consisting of Munich, Bayer. Staatsbibliothek, Clm 18787, olim Tegernseensis, and all the deteriores , the other consisting of just two manuscripts, E and its twin, Vatican, Pal. lat. 1525 . V comes to a halt at §43; the early collations of E are therefore of the highest importance for pro Sulla until §81, especially from §43 onwards where they comprise our only record for one of the tradition's two branches. (shrink)

In dem bislang wenig beachteten Kodex Ms. lat. fol. 456 der Staatsbibliothek Preußischer Kulturbesitz zu Berlin fanden wir unter den vielen, zumeist anonym überlieferten Werken des 13. Jahrhunderts eine interessante Quaestio, die ein Problem aus dem Bereich der Metaphysik und Sprachlogik zum Gegenstand hat. Der Verfasser dieser Abhandlung, ein gewisser Magister Guillelmus Anglicus, dessen Name wir aus dem Kolophon erfahren, greift die, wie er selbst betont, zu seiner Zeit viel und kontrovers diskutierte Frage auf: Ist der Terminus (...) «Mensch» einem einzigen Sinne nach unterschiedslos sowohl in bezug auf seine in Wirklichkeit seienden als auch nichtseienden Supposita? (shrink)

"A celebrated master of the spoken as well as the written word, Isaiah Berlin here gives us a rare memoir in the form of a dialogue." "Isaiah Berlin is renowned the world over for his analysis of the ideas that have influenced or transformed societies. He has a deep commitment to liberty and pluralism, and has devoted the half century and more of his professional life as a teacher and lecturer to exploring the conditions that allow these ideals (...) to flourish, and those that threaten them." "Berlin here intersperses insights into the development of his ideas and political philosophy with rich personal reminiscences. He discusses Machiavelli, Marx, Vico, Herder, and Herzen, among others, and their influence over him." "As he leads us from Petrograd to Oxford, Washington, Moscow, London, and Jerusalem, he speaks of his friends and contemporaries: W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Igor Stravinsky, A. J. Ayer, Bertrand Russell, and many others. He tells of his moving encounters with Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak, and Chaim Weizmann, and of his passion for music and literature." "Frank and engaging, Conversations with Isaiah Berlin is a remarkable record of one of the great intellectual odysseys of our time."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved. (shrink)

Isaiah Berlin: A Celebration gathers tributes, reflections, and commentaries on the great thinker and his philosophy, politics, and life-including contributions from Michael Ignatieff, Leon Wieseltier, Ronald Dworkin, Stephen Spender, and many others. "Some [essays], like Joseph Brodsky's tribute, are touchingly personal. Others, like G. A. Cohen's 'Isaiah's Marx, and Mine,' mingle personal reminiscences with a more theoretical look at Berlin's ideas. . . . The volume is a fitting tribute to a thinker famed for his erudition, eclecticism, and (...) clarity of style."--Merle Rubin, The Christian Science Monitor "One of the many merits of this rich and rewarding collection is the sense-very imperfectly conveyed here-it transmits of the tone of Berlin's writings and conversation, of the multiplicity of his interests and the variety of his achievements. . . . The essays testify to the character of Berlin's mind as a luminous prism, in which the cultural traditions of Russia, England and Judaism are marvelously refracted."--John Gray, Times Literary Supplement "[T]he collection testifies to the learning and profundity of Berlin's thought and, by way both of reminiscence and influence, to the charm and gaity of its expression."--Anthony Quinton, The Times of London. (shrink)

Isaiah Berlin is heralded as one of the great thinkers of the 20th century and this editied work by a group of distinguished scholars is an examination of an Humean liberal intellectual. Isaiah Berlin's legacy still excites intense scholarly debate.

This lecture insisted upon negative liberty as the political complement to the human capacity for free choice, and made matching metaphysical claims: the nature of being, and especially the conflicts amongst values, were inconsistent with totalitarian claims. Berlin, arguing along this line, provided an account of the perversion of positive liberty into a warrant for such claims, discussed nationalism, and emphasized the value‐pluralism, now linked so frequently with his name.

The work reported in this monograph was begun in the winter of 1967 in a graduate seminar at Berkeley. Many of the basic data were gathered by members of the seminar and the theoretical framework presented here was initially developed in the context of the seminar discussions. Much has been discovered since1969, the date of original publication, regarding the psychophysical and neurophysical determinants of universal, cross-linguistic constraints on the shape of basic color lexicons, and something, albeit less, can now also (...) be said with some confidence regarding the constraining effects of these language-independent processes of color perception and conceptualization on the direction of evolution of basic color term lexicons. (shrink)

In this outstanding collection of essays, Isaiah Berlin, one of the great thinkers of the twentieth century, discusses the importance in the history of thought of dissenters whose ideas still challenge conventional wisdom--among them Machiavelli, Vico, Montesquieu, Herzen, and Sorel. With his unusual powers of imaginative re-creation, Berlin brings to life original minds that swam against the current of their times.

"Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made."--Immanuel Kant Isaiah Berlin was one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century--an activist of the intellect who marshaled vast erudition and eloquence in defense of the endangered values of individual liberty and moral and political pluralism. In the Crooked Timber of Humanity he exposes the links between the ideas of the past and the social and political cataclysms of our present century: between the Platonic (...) belief in absolute Truth and the lure of authoritarianism between the eighteenth-century reactionary ideologue Joseph de Maistre and twentieth-century fascism between the romanticism of Schiller and Byron and the militant--and sometimes genocidal--nationalism that convulses the modern world. (shrink)

"Political Ideas in the Twentieth Century", Historical Inevitability", "Two Concepts of Liberty", "John Stuart Mill and the Ends of Life". These four essays deal with the various aspects of individual liberty, including the distinction between positive and negative liberty and the necessity of rejecting determinism if we wish to keep hold of the notions of human responsibility and freedom.

Liberty is an expanded edition of Isaiah Berlin's classic of liberalism, Four Essays on Liberty. Berlin's editor Henry Hardy has incorporated a fifth essay, as Berlin wished, and added further pieces on the same topic, so that Berlin's principal statements on liberty are available together for the first time. He also describes the gestation of the book and throws further biographical light on Berlin's preoccupation with liberty in appendices drawn from his unpublished writings.

About the philosophy of Giambattista Vico, 1668- 1774 and Johann Gottfried Herder, 1774-1803.