About DARE
The Digital Averroes Research Environment (DARE) is an open access research platform for the study of the works of the 12th century Andalusian philosopher Abū l-Walīd Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad Ibn Rušd (1126–1198), commonly known as “Averroes.”
The platform provides digital images of the medieval manuscripts and early modern prints transmitting Averroes’s writings, as well as online transcriptions of these texts, based either on scholarly editions or the most reliable witnesses available. DARE includes, besides the original Arabic texts written by Averroes, also the Hebrew and Latin translations of these writings that were produced between the early 13th and the late 16th century, and which were largely responsible for the significant influence and enduring importance of Averroes in the history of philosophy.
The DARE Viewer offers the possibility to browse, search, and read this material, and, above all, to compare on the screen multiple versions and/or textual witnesses of the same work. Below you find a more detailed introduction into the contents and background of the project.
DARE is a service provided by the Thomas-Institute at the University of Cologne.
Aims and Development
The Digital Averroes Research Environment is intended as a research infrastructure for the study of the works of Averroes. Its principal function is to collect, describe, and provide easy access to all existing research materials on Averroes, including primary sources, scholarly editions, and research literature. DARE thereby pursues three main objectives:
first, to assemble in one single place and in a consistent framework the results of more than hundred years of modern Averroes scholarship, which are today scattered over disparate and often elusive publications, in order to preserve and unify them, as well as to open the material up for digital research techniques;
second, to establish a standard reference system that allows scholars to easily find, clearly address, and comfortably compare all passages relevant for their respective research topics in all extant versions of the texts;
third, to build an environment able to absorb the results of the new research it hopes to inspire and to further, especially with respect to new and more accurate editions of Averroes’s works.
The Digital Averroes Research Environment hence is not a corpus edition of the works of Averroes, its emphasis is not on editing, but rather on gathering in one open access platform the already existing resources and editions. In spite of this, DARE has also prepared and continues to prepare edited transcriptions of works by Averroes that are based on early modern prints or even on manuscript sources and are here published for the first time. The aim is to make accessible as large a range of texts as possible, so that scholars may obtain an overview over the entire oeuvre of Averroes.
The medium-term goal thus is completeness, not precision. During the initial phase of the project (2010–2016), a small crew of collaborators has produced digital transcriptions of not less than 43 Arabic, Hebrew, and Latin texts covering together several thousand pages of text, not to speak of hundreds of manuscript descriptions. All this took place while the technical basis for recording and displaying this mass of information was under continuous development. Inevitably, therefore, DARE is still replete with mistakes. While the collaborators at the Thomas-Institute do their best to detect and eliminate as many of these mistakes as possible, we also hope that scholars everywhere will find DARE useful enough to engage in making it better. We gladly welcome corrections and criticism! Please simply send us an email.
In August 2019 we are in the final stages of a phase of technical consolidation (2017–2019), during which no new material has been added to DARE, apart from some 200 new manuscript scans. Instead, we have done intensive work on the structure and storing of the project data, in order to be prepared for future developments. There also has been a complete overhaul of the DARE Viewer which now provides new functions for viewing and comparing texts and sources.
During this time, the team at the Thomas-Institute has continued to produce transcriptions of several further writings by Averroes which will by and by be published in DARE.
Scope and Contents
For bibliographical descriptions of the individual works please refer to the entries in the Works Inventory. An overview of the complete oeuvre of Averroes, comprising 104 works in more than three hundred textual versions, is to be found…