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List of German philosophical works that are available as scans
(Soon available: List of English philosophical works that are available as scans)
↓ How can you help that this list grows?
This page in German (more complete): Vernachlässigte deutsche philosophische Texte

Digitized English Philosophical Texts

Thanks to digitization projects many philosophical texts are now available for free as scans. This gives us easy access to many unknown texts. The unknown texts are often undeservedly unknow. Historians of philosophy have often ignored texts which defend views which they do not like. Positivists and Marxists believe, or try to make other people believe, that more and more people believe that there is no God (atheism), that man has no soul (materialism), and that there are no objective values or duties (moral nihilism or subjectivism). Further, they favour non-precise, unclear philosophers over more academic, scholastic, argumentative philosophers. For example, historians of philosophy make people believe that German philosophy in the 19th century consisted mainly of German idealism, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Feuerbach, while in fact Hermann Lotze, Bernard Bolzano, Franz von Brentano, and Herman Ulrici were amongst the best scientific (in the sense of the Latin ‘scientia’ and the German ‘wissenschaftlich’) philosophers of their time. All these four were theists and not materialists and thus neither 'modern' nor 'enlightened', and all of them are ignored by most historians of philosophy. Most of Lotzes writings were translated into English soon after their publication and were influential in England and in the USA. Today the writings of these four philosophers, as well as many other philosophical texts, are hardly known and out of print or available in print only in expensive editions.

However, now a large amount of philosophical texts which appeared before 1922 are available as scans in the internet. This is a valuable source of philosophical ideas and arguments for philosophical research. Contemporary philosophy forgot many insights, views and arguments which philosophers in the 19th and 18th centuries knew. We are producing a database of these texts with links to the sites where the scans can be downloaded. The growing list of German works is HERE, the list of English works is in preparation. For the search function Java must be enabled in the browser. Below you find information about how you can help to make this list grow.

Where can the scans be downloaded? The richest two sources are Google Books and the Internet Archive.

Advice on downloading scans from Archive.org

Use the advanced search. There you can also do an xml search. For example, search for 'creator:bolzano title:athanasia mediatype:texts'; choose as format 'HTML table' and as 'fields to return' creator, date, identifier, title, volume, year.
The texts on Archive.org are offered in the formats PDF and DjVu (to read DjVu files use a browser plugin or a stand alone reader). DjVu is the better format for scans, but Google scans are better as PDFs because that is their original format. Foxit is a PDF reader that is smaller and faster than Adobe's Acrobat Reader.
How to download a pdf file from Archive.org: Look, for example, at the page of the book "Geist und Körper, Seele und Leib" by Ludwig Busse. Click on the left on "All files: HTTP" There you find the link to the PDF file.
(Alternative: Click on the right on "Flip Book". Then click on "Print". Then click on PDF.)
An inofficial FAQ for the texts on Archive.org.
Archive FAQs

Advice on downloading scans from Google Books

Google Books makes many books which appeared after 1868 downloadable only in the USA. For example (this book.) First solution: the Firefox addon Googlesharing. Second solution: a proxy in the USA. Free proxies are often slow, so consider a commercial proxy like Foxyproxy or Xroxy. Administer proxies with the Firefox addon FoxyProxy, MM3-ProxySwitch, or QuickProxy (just for switching one proxy on and off). Many of these texts have been uploaded on Archive.org. (Do the same!)
The other volumes of multi-volume works can be found under 'other editions'.
The download manager Downthemall can help.

Further sources of digitized books:

Hathi Trust contains many scanned books from Google Books, Internet Archive, and others. But the texts cannot be downloaded!
Post-Reformation Digital Library
Europeana The largest European digital library. Here you find also the content of Gallica.
Gallica (Digitalization project of the French national library)
The Universal Digital Library (Million Book Collection)
Openlibrary (contains many titles and sometimes links to downloads)
The European Library (here you can search several European national libraries)
Search enginge for ebooks: eBdb.net, 2020ok.com,

Here is the list of downloadable German philosophical books.
The list of English books will appear soon.

How can you help to make this list grow?

1. Download philosophical texts from Google-Books or other sites or scan books and upload them on Archive.org if they are not there yet. Three reasons for this: First, on Google Books it is difficult to find books. Second, sometimes books disappear from Google Books, and in the future Google Books might make free download impossible. Third, many books on Google Books cannot be downloaded outside the USA. Advice for uploading books to Archive.org:

Encode special characters (non-ascii characters) in "Title" and "Description" with their HTML names or with unicode. So write instead of "ä" "ä" or "ä" (Unicode), replace "ö" by "ö" or "ö", replace "ü" by "ü" or "ü", replace "ß" by "ß" or "ß", replace "Ä" by "Ä" or "Ä", replace "Ö" by "Ö" or "Ö", replace "Ü" by "Ü" or "Ü" (see on this Archive FAQ).
If the title of a book is long, then write only a shortened title in the field 'title', and write the complete title, including the subtitle, into the field 'descrpition'.
For multi-volume works write the number of the volume into the fields 'title' and 'description'. Also into the field 'volume', which you can create only after uploading.
Write the year into the fields "date" and "year".
An inofficial FAQ for the texts on Archive.org.
Archive FAQs
Archive Forum "Texts"; Archive Forum "Open Source Books"; Archive Forum "Million Books Project"

2. Add philosophical texts that are on Archive.org to the German list or the future English list on this site. The list is created from this German bibtex file, here is the English bibtex file. (Latin books are added to the German file.) The bibtex files have been created with the free software Jabref. Create a bibtex file with the new entries and send them to me at epost@ABC.de (replace "ABC" by "von-wachter"). Note:

The bibtex file should be encoded with ISO-8859-1; it should contain the additional fields 'url', 'url2' and 'notiz'. You can achieve this by importing these Jabref settings.
If two volumes of a work have separate titles, enter them as separate items.
Into the field 'url' put a link to the page of this book on Archive.org.
Into the field 'url2' you can put a link to the page of this book on Google Books. Delete everything in the URL after and including the symbol "&". A valid url is for example "http://books.google.com/books?id=dSpAAAAAcAAJ".
Into the field 'notiz' you can write further URLs. For example <a href="http://www.archive.org/details/bbolzanoswissen01bolzgoog">volume 1</a>, <a href="http://www.archive.org/details/bbolzanoswissen02bolzgoog">volume 2</a>
URLs may contain only alphanumerics 0-9a-zA-Z and the special characters $-_.+!*'(). Replace '&' by '%26'. HERE you find the encodings of other symbols. (If the URL contains a questionmark, '?', then after it special characters should be replaced by their html names, e.g. '&' should be replaced by '&'.)

Notes on some philosophers

German philosophers are listed at scans.htm.

Robert Baronius

Professor in Aberdeen

Johannes Combach

Professor in Oxford.

Gilbert Jack (Jachaeus, Jacchaeus) (c. 1578 - 1628)

Scottish Aristotelian philosopher.

John Bramhall (1594-1663)

Kritiker Hobbes'.

Thomas Barlow (1607-1691)

Henry More (1614-1687)

John Wilkins (1614-1672)

Ralph Cudworth (1617-1688)

John Locke (1632–1704)

Read his texts in a simplified form at www.earlymoderntexts.com.

William Wollaston (1659-1724)

Thomas Halyburton (1674 - 1712)

Samuel Clarke (1675-1729)

The Being and Attributes of God, 1704
Evidences of Natural and Revealed Religion, 1705

Joseph Butler (1692-1752)

The Analogy of Religion, 1736

Thomas Reid (1710-1796)

George Campbell (1719-1796)

Richard Price (1723-1791)

James Beattie (1735-1803)

William Paley (1743-1805)

The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy, 1785
Horae Paulinae, or the Truth of the Scripture History of St Paul, 1790
View of the Evidences of Christianity, 1794
Natural Theology: or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, 1809