Philosophy in Library Special Collections

LSC is committed to remediating harmful description by creating and implementing an anti-oppressive approach to discovery and access. We aim to:

• Be clear about what we know, how we know it, and what we don't know
• Embrace baseline description as a tool to improve the discoverability of all our materials
• Demonstrate an understanding that description is a continuous and necessarily iterative endeavor

Read more about our past and current approaches to description in Toward Ethical and Inclusive Descriptive Practices in UCLA Library Special Collections.

Curators in UCLA Library Special Collections do not actively collect in the subject area of philosophy. However, we do have significant primary resources which will be of interest to researchers and scholars.

In 1950, UCLA Library Special Collections acquired en bloc the library of the late Professor Abraham Wolf, Head of the Department of the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of London. At the time, the library was the largest private collection of works by and about Baruch de Spinoza, and included Spinoza's works in many editions, important biographical and critical works about his writing, and a collection of titles of books Spinoza was known to have read.

Among the more important items in the collection are the Codex Townley, thought to be the earliest manuscript of J.M. Lucas's La vie de feu Monsieur Spinoza; one of the two known copies of the first edition of Lucas's La vie et l'esprit de Mr. Benoit de Spinoza; and issues A through D of Spinoza's Tractatus theologico-politicus, not recorded in Linde.

David S. Zeidberg
former Head of UCLA Library Special Collections
May 1990

(from the introduction in the PDF below)