The philosophical foundations of medicine - Digital critical edition of Peter of Abano's Conciliator (Differentiae 1 to 10)

• Applicant: Dr. Christian Kaiser
• Subject Area: History of Philosophy ; History of Science
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 470012850

The project aims at providing a digital critical edition of the first part (Differentiae 1 to 10) of the Conciliator differentiarum philosophorum et praecipue medicorum, one of the central texts of medieval medicine and natural philosophy. Its author, Peter of Abano (Pietro dʼAbano; ca. 1250 to ca. 1315), was concerned with presenting in detail and critically the divergent doctrinal opinions that existed within the medical and philosophical literature at his time, and with systematically resolving or „reconciling“ (conciliare) their apparent contradictions. Due to its considerable reception and printing history, the Conciliator functioned as an authoritative basic text of pre-modern science. Its content is of great importance for the history of philosophy and medicine, but also for questions of literary and cultural history. In order to make this source accessible for interdisciplinary research according to current editorial standards, the present project combines philological, philosophical, and medical historical expertise with the know-how of digital editing. In this way, it conducts foundational research in the humanities on the basis of current digitization technologies. In addition to the constituted main text, the critical apparatus, the fontes, and the commentary, the digital critical edition will present a research portal that goes far beyond the possibilities of printed editions. In the present case, these consist above all in (1) a more comprehensive indexing and cross-linking of source documents that can record forms of medieval intertextuality and make them comprehensible to the extent of their historical reference system, and (2) in an investigation and presentation of the transmission history of the work. With the help of selected digital copies, expanded transcriptions, explanatory texts, and stemmatological assessments, the work can be made comprehensible beyond the framework of the edited part and thus made newly accessible for scholarship. The stemma, which will be compiled and presented for the first time in the course of the project, will make an important contribution to the reliable referencing of the complete work through a reassessment, especially of the early modern prints, and a corresponding presentation of textual witnesses of the stemlines considered to be particularly valuable. A detailed introduction will describe the manuscripts and prints and explore the previously unresolved textual history. The references to historical sources, especially from the Greek, Latin, and Arabic philosophical and medical literature, will not only be shown in the source apparatus and linked from there to available source texts, but will also be discussed and contextualized in an accompanying commentary on the history of philosophy and science.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants