The Uncharted Margins of Philosophy

Type of project: European  |  Start date: 01/03/2025  |  End date: 28/02/2030

Contrary to a popular belief, holding that philosophy in Arabic declined around the twelfth century CE, reflection on key philosophical problems has actually continued to thrive in forms that are still largely unexplored to date. Arabic philosophical manuscripts present a wealth of textual and visual annotations by students, teachers, and individual scholars who have kept selecting, manually copying, teaching, and studying philosophical texts up to our days. Well after the printing revolution, the margins of manuscripts served across the Arabo-Islamic world as material platforms for this choral philosophical enterprise.

Yet, with only a few notable exceptions, this “real-life” philosophy has been cut out of historico-philosophical accounts, in which the spotlight is often on a relatively narrow canon of great minds. The views shared by the many professors, students, and scholars who contributed to shape the practice of philosophy in the Islamicate world have thus remained on the uncharted margins of manuscripts and on the fringe of the global history of philosophy.

The ERC Starting Grant project “The Uncharted Margins of Philosophy” (UnMaP) aims to bring those contributions from the margins of manuscripts into the forefront of philosophical discourse. By delving into the paratextual annotations found within the manuscript tradition of the Logic section of Avicenna’s (Ibn Sīnā, d. 428H/1037) most encompassing philosophical summa, the “Book of Healing” (“Kitāb al-Shifāʾ”), UnMaP promises to broaden the horizons of the global history of philosophy.

Within the UnMaP project, Cnr-Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale “Antonio Zampolli” (CNR-ILC) provides methods and tools for digital textual criticism and computational philology, supporting the production of digital scholarly editions. In particular, it makes available CoPhiEditor, a web-based editor compliant with the TEI P5 standard and designed according to the DSL-based Digital Scholarly Editions approach (i.e., editions built through domain-specific languages). The platform already available for several contexts, notably within the GreekSchools project, enables collaborative transcription and revision workflows, even for users without advanced technical expertise, and supports layout and publishing pipelines for both digital and print publication. CoPhiEditor structures the editing work into modular units that place the text alongside the corresponding manuscript images.

In parallel, CNR-ILC contributes to the development of Artificial Intelligence components for the Digital Humanities, for example predictive models to support the palaeographical analysis of manuscripts. These tools are intended to assist scholarly investigation across large image collections while maintaining an approach in which interpretive responsibility and final judgment remain firmly with textual scholars.