Research Tools, and a few queries

• A new database has been launched: Premodern Philosophical and Scientific Hebrew Terminology in Context, or “PESHAT in Context” for short. This is part of a long-term project, organized by the Institute for Jewish Philosophy and Religion at the University of Hamburg and by the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Although it is not yet available for general access, the editors let me have an advance look, and it promises to be a remarkably useful tool for anyone interested either in Hebrew philosophy, or in the transmission of philosophical ideas across Arabic, Hebrew, and Latin. As part of the project, there will also be a regular series of colloquia etc., and a mailing list for those who want to stay abreast of the project. For more information, contact peshat@uni-hamburg.de.
• The folk at the Aquinas Institute – the ones who keep publishing these big blue Latin-English volumes – are awfully excited about a new software system that has “revolutionized” their work: Trados Studio 2017. (See the breathless account here.) Really? Is this a big deal for folk like you and me? Does anyone know about this?
• I happened to notice, over the summer, that the seventeenth and final volume has now appeared of the British Academy’s Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources. See a review here. This made me wonder: is this huge project of any use to the study of medieval philosophy? More generally, are there any medieval Latin dictionaries that are of any help to our field (other, of course, than something like the Thomas-Lexikon)?
• Speaking of useful lexicons, I recently had the occasion to want a digital copy of Cappelli’s great Lexicon abbreviaturarum, the essential guide to Latin manuscript abbreviations. Philip Choi hunted it down here. (This is a German version, but it doesn’t matter. I might add, as well, that this little book can still readily be purchased in print.) This too made me wonder: is there now anything better than Cappelli out there? I seem to recall talk, some years back, of a fully electronic version of something like Cappelli, but I don’t know what came of it.

Job and Study Opportunities

Anyone looking for a job in medieval philosophy will know to check philjobs.org, and so I generally don’t bother to report on those (so far few) announcements here. But here are some things worth noting:

• There is a new European initiative, the a.r.t.e.s. Graduate School for the Humanities, in Cologne, which is advertising ten well-funded positions for doctoral study in the humanities. This might seem too broad in its scope to be worth noting, except that the director of the program is Andreas Speer, better known to readers of this blog as the director of the Thomas Institut.
• The Groningen Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Thought is advertising three funded doctoral positions and two post-docs, aimed at scholars interested in the transition from medieval to early modern philosophy. Links to these positions can be found here.
• The University of Jyväskylä is advertising a four-year post-doc position for a scholar studying kalam, and also a four-year doctoral position for the study of philosophical Sufi literature.