Corpus Details

The corpus on this site contains several English-language philosophical texts published in Britain between 1650 and 1830. The aim is to provide free and high-quality digital critical texts for all of the works in this corpus, alongside tools for performing sophisticated searches and comparative textual analyses. Note however that this project is still in the early stages. So far there are texts by Mary Astell, George Berkeley, Joseph Butler, Anne Conway, Judith Drake, Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, Francis Hutcheson, John Locke, Bernard Mandeville, Lady Masham [Damaris Cudworth], John Norris, and Lord Shaftesbury [Anthony Ashley Cooper].

The selection is based on the following general considerations:

1. Works should be originally published in English. This restriction is necessary because of the kinds of computational linguistic analyses we want to run, which only make sense applied to a single language. Hobbes and Conway necessitate bending this rule slightly. We have included the English versions of Hobbes’s works that he himself published (even if he published a Latin version first), but excluded his Latin works that were only translated posthumously. The original English manuscript of Conway’s Principles of Ancient and Modern Philosophy, meanwhile, does not survive. It was first published in a Latin translation, then posthumously translated from the Latin back into English; we have included this third-hand English text, for want of anything better.
2. Works should be philosophical in a suitably broad sense, given the period, and consequently the list includes many works on what we would now consider more as theology or social science. We have even included two histories of England (Hume’s and Macaulay’s), but only because of the independent philosophical interest in these writers; we are not including histories more generally.
3. Works should be written by a known British author (the highly influential Dutch-born immigrant Mandeville being a partial exception to this rule). This is simply to keep things within reasonable bounds. Works by unknown authors or North American writers could be added in the future. (This is why—with apologies to the Irish, Scottish, and Welsh—I have called this site English Philosophical Texts Online, and not British Philosophical Texts Online. As with the similarly titled Early English Books Online, it is to the language and not the nation that we are referring.)
4. The collection should include adequate female representation, with a minimum target of 20%. Happily that target is being comfortably exceeded at present.

We welcome suggestions for additional works of interest that we may have missed. Particularly welcome are works by neglected or forgotten female philosophers.