Editorial Principles

The purpose of this project is to make a broad canon of English philosophical texts easily and freely available for students and scholars to read, search, and computationally analyse and compare. To this end, and to keep things within reasonable bounds, we aim to provide just one critical text for each work, but a critical text without any textual apparatus or commentary. In other words, we aim to identify the most authoritative copytext – typically the last edition the author saw through the press – and then to silently ‘correct’ it according to our best judgement (e.g. by incorporating variants from another edition or manuscript that seem preferable, or implementing changes noted in any published ERRATA sheets).

A silently edited critical text, without any accompanying critical apparatus, is of course of limited use for serious textual scholarship. But the editions provided on this site are not intended for that purpose.

Though our aim is to provide (silently edited) critical texts, we expect to be striving towards this goal for some time, and will provide imperfect editions along the way. In practice, we will be constrained by the quality of the publicly available digital editions that we have to start with, and by our own limited time and resources. We would be enormously grateful if, while using the texts on this site, you could keep an eye out for potential errors and inform us of any that you notice.

Formatting

Our copytexts use italics and small-caps for emphasis, and sometimes capitalise (or render in small-caps) the first word of every paragraph. We replicate this formatting here. As a rule, we do not extend such formatting to the surrounding punctuation (in the original texts it is not always clear whether the surrounding punctuation is thus formatted or not). Many texts also start each section with a large dropped capital (spanning two lines), or even an ornamented capital. These are rendered here simply as normal capital letters.

Notes

All notes are rendered here as endnotes at the end of each section (in an online publication with no page breaks, the idea of a footnote does not apply). For ease of reference, we have replaced note anchors with numbers. In some original texts, there is a distinction between footnotes and endnotes; in such cases, there is invariably a footnote pointing the reader to the relevant endnote. We preserve this distinction by reproducing the footnote text pointing to the endnote, but then display the text of the endnote immediately following.

Margin Comments

Some texts include small comments printed in the margin, typically indicating the topic currently being addressed in the main text. These comments are rendered here floating to the right of the paragraph, rather than in the actual margin.

Apostrophes

The use of the apostrophe changed during the eighteenth century, eventually settling on the present conventions. In the seventeenth and early eighteenth century, however, its usage was somewhat inconsistent. We preserve these inconsistencies here, leaving apostrophes as they are in the originals.