The Spinoza Bibliography in many ways represents a new tool for research in academia. The aim is a complete record of Spinoza literature since 1663. We endeavour to continually keep up to date and increase the data collection, in particular with the aid of the Spinoza research community.
The collection already contains several thousand items, consisting of
Monographs and essays are the two categories that further encompass those texts that cannot easily be attributed to another category.
Using the Link to this page shown in detailed view a link can be set to the individual entry using thereby facilitating the direct citation of bibliographic entries in the Spinoza Bibliography.
The foundations of this bibliography are firmly footed in a project which was initiated in the department of legal philosophy at the Faculty of Law of the Leibniz University Hannover in 1989. Its aim was to assess the reception of Spinoza's political philosophy in Germany. The main focus will still rest on titles published in Germany, by German authors or those which have the history of the reception of Spinoza in Germany as their theme. The years up to 1780 and since 1900 have so far been illuminated in detail. A number of these titles has so far not been changed to the current conventions for inclusion and are thus incomplete or erroneous. As of autumn 2007, a network of experts from numerous countries is being assembled who will work on the inclusion of literature in their respective language. The responsible editors commissioned so far are:
To be able to produce as comprehensive a collection as possible, we would be very grateful for your help. We have prepared forms which you may use to report missing titles and errors and omissions in titles already recorded in our collection.
Please do use these forms and get in touch as this increases the quality of this bibliography, which in turn benefits all users including you. Do remember: nothing is as useful to a careful bibliographer as a careful bibliographer. Using the means described we will be able to provide a comprehensive, ever growing international online bibliography, the quality of which will increase steadily. The Spinoza-Gesellschaft is responsible for the content.
Using the means described we will be able to provide a comprehensive, ever growing international online bibliography, the quality of which will increase steadily. The Spinoza-Gesellschaft is responsible for the content.
The financial basis was provided by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft for the initial and the later parts of the project through support for the research undertaking "Spinoza's Theory of political Institutions" in the early 1990s. This support extended to the creation of a customised internet database for the purposes of providing this online bibliography. In a number of different project phases, we also benefitted from funding of the Land Niedersachsen [State of Lower Saxony], Leibniz University Hannover and its Faculty of Law.
The Herzog August Library Wolfenbüttel has kindly given permission to use the Spinoza portrait on our website.
The Philipps University Marburg undertakes to provide a mirroring of the bibliography on their servers.
The publishing house frommann-holzboog has contributed their considerable experience in publishing academic content in print and have transferred this knowledge to the application on the internet. They were tasked with, at the same time as carrying out the classic work of a publishing house during the course of a print publication, conceptually working out the technical, structural and aesthetic aspects of the internet presentation. They further undertook the management and qualitative control of the implementation as well as the dissemination of the results by means of appropriate marketing. One of the decisive aspects of the project was the notion of open access. Access to the current and future academic content was to be free for all.
The idea to publish the data collection we had collected over some 15 years for free use on the internet, using a database with the latest design, was that of publisher Eckhart Holzboog and Hans-Jörg Ehni. The golden section team, implemented the project and contributed helpful feedback and improvements.
A number of staff in the department of legal philosophy have contributed to the bibliographic research in the last 18 years. The fact that the bibliography is ready to go online at a time when the department is finally closed is due to the intensive work of Arne Upmeier.
Since December 2004 Antje Rühle and Hans Pingel are the administrators of the project.
Manfred Walther, Hannover / Eckart Holzboog, Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt
As outlined above, the data from the bibliographic project "Spinoza in Germany" form the basis of this collection. This is the reason why the bibliography is more comprehensive for the German language area. There are also periodic differences: whilst the Spinoza related literature in the German language area up to 1780 (the beginnings of the Spinoza renaissance) ought to be virtually complete, some considerable gaps appear in other periods.
Since the project Spinoza in Germany had a different design, the titles which we have taken on board from that project have generally only been assessed in terms of their mention of other Spinoza literature in the German language area. These titles are marked for 'Spinoza in Germany'. Entries marked completely bibliographically evaluated have been evaluated in full and according to the new system, without special attention to the German language area. This should save further work in relation to re-checking these titles.
Titles marked autopsied were physically available at the time of data entry and were directly checked for page numbers, mentions etc. They were therefore not taken from other sources. Autopsied titles were, however, not necessarily checked for any Spinoza literature they may contain.
The Spinoza bibliography is based on a custom database. During programming, performed by the golden section team in Stuttgart, attention was paid to the highest possible degree of openness in relation to future developments, technical and in terms of content as well as advanced search and entry methods. This is realised on the basis of modular and object oriented programming, in particular through the exclusive use of open source technology (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) and open standards (SQL, XML, XHTML, CSS). The implementation of an XML interface for data export permits long term archiving of the complete data collection.
