Ferdinand Ebner Edition

I. Description of Project: The project concerns the whole corpus of Ferdinand Ebners (1882-1931) manuscripts, which are kept at the Brenner Archives in Innsbruck. The whole literary estate of Ebner is composed of nearly 1800 texts and contains his philosophical works, the diaries and noticebooks and many letters. This includes Ebner s main work "Das Wort und die geistigen Realitäten. Pneumatologische Fragmente". In this text Ebner produces a new form of anthropology which is based on a dialogue-orientated understanding of human existence. II. The Problem to be Addressed/The State of Research: Up to now the most extensive edition of Ebners works was published by Franz Seyr in 1963-65. His main work was published the first time in 1921 by the Brenner Verlag and was often reprinted. In the meantime all of Ebners works are out of print, so that nothing of Ebners is available in German now. Due to the initiative of the university of Trient an Italian translation of Ebners main work, "Pneumatologische Fragmente", came out in 1998 followed by several monographs about Ebner. That is why the centre of the scientific research is at the time not in Austria, but in Italy. The Seyr-edition is merely a selection of the complete work and has no historic-critical commentary. Therefor transcription and explanation of all the original texts is urgently necessary to facilitate scholarly research on Ebner. It will not only enable readers to discover Ebners unknown works, but also many aspects of his thinking, which are not in the foreground of the known publications. A first step in this direction was the so-called "Mühlauer Tagebuch", which was published in the Böhlau-Verlag 2001. In the past two years the preliminary works for the critical editing and publication of Ebner`s main work and of important parts of his early and late works have been done. Now all versions of the "Fragmente", the correspondence and the diaries, both written in the time between 1915 and 1919, which is relevant for the commentary, are available. III. Project Goals: The goal of the project is a scholarly edition of the literary estate of Ferdinand Ebner, consisting of transcriptions of all his published and unpublished works, his diaries, letters, documents about his life and a commentary. Additionaly the publication of the major works is planned. IV. Methodology, Timetable, Work Schedule: As in the case of other projects the program "Folio Views" is used for the transcription and the commentary of the literary estate. With this program a lot of information can be searched with little effort. While working on the project in the last years a structure for the data bank was developed, which includes the transcribed texts and the commentary. Planned for three years, the first two years will be producing a critical edition, the commentary and the publication of the main work and the diaries from 1916/17/18. In the second and third year the editing and publication of partly unknown pieces of the early and late works of Ebner is planned. During the whole time the correspondence between Ebner and Luise Karpischek will be edited and published. There is an agreement with the university of Trient to cooperate at the international level.