When one goes beyond a first, superficial understanding of any of Descartes’s primary works, whether the Meditations, Discourse on Method, or the Principles of Philosophy, one realizes that the basis for many of his doctrines cannot be found in the primary works themselves. For this, one needs to consult his correspondence. Unfortunately, the standard edition of Descartes’s letters (by Adam and Tannery) is about a century old; its second edition, almost forty years old, improved upon the first significantly, but made it practically unusable. And there is no complete English translation of the correspondence, just a one-volume selection of partial translations from the French and Latin. A new historico-critical edition and complete English translation of the corpus has for many years been a major desideratum of the learned world.

We are delighted to announce, therefore, that Roger Ariew (University of South Florida) and Erik-Jan Bos (Utrecht University) have been awarded $235,000 by the US National Endowment for the Humanities to enable them, together with Theo Verbeek and others, to complete a new critical edition of Descartes’s correspondence with a complete English translation, to be published by Oxford University Press in 2014. Erik-Jan is a long-standing friend of Cultures of Knowledge; as well being a core member of the CKCC team at Huygens ING, he participated in our 2010 data workshop, our 2010 conference, and spoke to our 2011 seminar about the loss, theft, and forgery of Descartes’s letters (see the brief video above in which Erik-Jan discusses his surprise discovery of a hitherto unknown epistle via Google in 2010). Warmest congratulations to Erik-Jan and all of the editorial team!

Erik-Jan points out the stamp which, when viewed under UV light, alerted him to the stolen Libri letter.

The stolen letter on the 'Meditations', discovered by Erik-Jan at Haverford College in 2010.

In the third paper of our seminar series on Thursday 19 May, Dr Erik-Jan Bos (University of Utrecht) gave a talk entitled ‘To the Editor’s Delight: The Loss, Theft, and Forgery of Descartes’ Letters’. In a fascinating and playful analysis, Bos described some of the most outrageous examples of intellectual fraud and finagling he has encountered during his intensive work on the 750-letter corpus. These include the mysterious disappearance of the Stockholm chest in the early 1700s (one of two left to posterity by the French philosopher); omissions, elisions, and other dubious practices by Claude Clerselier, the first editor of the correspondence; the pilfering of around eighty letters by the voracious eighteenth-century manuscript collector Guglielmo Libri (one of which, previously unknown, was discovered by Erik-Jan in Haverford College in 2010); and some sensational and implausible nineteenth-century counterfeits created by forger Denis Vrain-Lucas and sold to the unwitting mathematician and collector Michel Chasles, who proclaimed their authenticity to the French Academy of Science. A lively discussion focused on attempts to reconstruct the contents of the Stockholm chest, the circumstances surrounding Erik-Jan’s discovery of the lost Libri letter in a Pennsylvania library, and the reasons for the surprisingly high percentage of out letters in the Cartesian corpus (570 surviving letters are from him, and only 180 to him). Seminars take place in the Faculty of History on George Street on Thursdays at 3pm. For future talks in the series, please see the seminar webpage.