Philosophy
The Ransom Center has major manuscript collections for the American Wittgensteinian philosopher and commentator O. K. Bouwsma (1898-1978); the American pragmatist Arthur E. Murphy (19011962); the Dublin-born Anglican philosopher Leslie Paul (1905-1985); the Spanish-American philosopher, poet, and critic George Santayana (1863-1952); and the philosopher and classicist Gregory Vlastos (1907-1991). Holdings for the British philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) include over one thousand of his letters to Lady Ottoline Morrell in addition to manuscript drafts and notebooks. A smaller group of manuscripts represents the work of the eminent British logician L. Susan Stebbing (1885-1943).
Within the French holdings, scholars will find a significant collection of materials for dramatist and philosopher Gabriel Marcel (1889-1973). Considered one of the first French existential philosophers, Marcel kept journals in which he not only recorded daily thoughts and activities but also worked out his most pressing philosophical issues. The Ransom Center's Marcel papers contain fifty-five such notebooks, ranging in date from 1908 to the mid-1960s, which includes his first publication from the notebooks, the Journal Métaphysique (1927). Marcel's work during World War I as a liaison officer with the Red Cross coupled with the loss of his mother at the age of four led him to Être et Avoir (1935), Le Mystère de l'être (1951), and Présence et immortalité (1959), all of which are represented in the notebooks. The papers also include manuscripts of plays, a creative form that had interested Marcel from boyhood and which often became a vehicle for expressing his philosophical ideas in a more practical or concrete way.
Rare books and microfilm documenting the history of logic exceed eighteen hundred titles by more than twelve hundred of the authors listed in Wilhelm Risse's Bibliographia Logica, 1500-1800. (See also Jean-Paul Sartre in French Literature.)
