Unus inter pares

Studies on Shared Scholarship

The world in which contemporary scholars live and work is manifold and overcrowded. The production of thought and books is becoming increasingly huge, and sometimes may seem overwhelming. This collective volume addresses the questions and the problems generated by this historical, and even civilizational, evolution. Knowledge, divided into many subfields and academic disciplines, is becoming a very complicated matter, one that is almost impossible to master as an undivided whole. Therefore, what does it mean to be a scholar (even an outstanding one), when the knowledge one can embrace is becoming exponentially wide ? What does it mean for a scholar to be learned and productive, and more precisely to share scholarship with many others in many languages all around the world ? What are the risks, and maybe the dangers, of this shared scholarship (contamination, plagiarism, inhibition, self-sterilization, meaningless sophistication, forgery, etc.), but also the possible advantages (collective work and tasks) of such a situation ? The contributors to this volume investigate how in the present and in the past scholars have learnt to cope with the increasing amount of scholarly production, what it means to search a part of a boundless whole, to be an « unus inter pares, » the differences between the (not necessarily all-knowing) artist and original-creative writer on one side, and the « scholar » as an academic agent, sometimes (or often) very learned, gifted and inventive on the other ? Contributors explore all the fields of science and knowledge, but particularly the humanities (philology, history, philosophy, literature, linguistics, etc.).