Human Sciences
Contact Jonathan Harrison, Alfred Pasternack or Barbara Scalvini
Human Sciences at Quaritch embraces a wide range of books and manuscripts documenting the history of ideas from the earliest times up to about 1960. Our strengths are in the history of economic thought and in philosophy, but we also deal in law; finance and banking (including speculation, actuarial science and insurance); politics and political theory; sociology; psychology; agriculture; education; logic; and the theory of language.
Some notable items which have recently passed through our hands include the only known copy of the Communist Manifesto inscribed by Karl Marx, Rudolf Carnap’s annotated copy of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (Logisch-philosophische Abhandlung), Joseph Penso de la Vega’s Confusion de Confusiones (1688, the first book to describe the practice of a stock-exchange) and a copy of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (4th edition, 1786), inscribed in Smith's own hand to Bonnie Prince Charlie's private secretary.
As well as dealing in individual books and manuscripts, we also offer collections. In recent years we have sold author collections of Friedrich Nietzsche, Bertrand Russell, Thorstein Veblen, Emile Durkheim and Jeremy Bentham. Among subject collections we have offered are the Herwood Library of accounting literature (including Pacioli's Summa de Arithmetica, 1494, the first printed exposition of double-entry book-keeping); the philosophy of language; texts pertaining to the theory and study of language in the West, and the history of probability - the calculus of probabilities, statistics and their applications.
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CARAVADOSSI, Enrico.
La moderna filosofia convinta d’inganno nelle sue promesse di felicità libertà ed uguaglianza ragionamenti...
Turin, Giammichele Brioio, 1793.
First and seemingly only edition of this attack on the false promises of the philosophes, by the Torinese Dominican friar Enrico Caravadossi.
£395
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CARNAP, Rudolf.
1959 & 1962.
The first photograph shows Carnap and his wife outside their house and is signed and, in another hand, dated 1959 as having been taken in Santa Monica. The second photograph is of Carnap and is dated 1960, signed and inscribed “Der lieben Erna, in alter Freundschaft”. This refers to Erna Lowenberg...
£1500
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CARNAP, Rudolf.
Existe-t-il des premises de la science qui soient incontrôlables? [Abstract from ‘Scientia’].
[N.p., n.p.,] September 1936.
First edition. ‘All the premises on which science depends, when they are not of a purely conventional nature, rest on experience’: thus the exitus of this article, a decisive statement of the impossibility of a synthetic proposition being beyond empirical test. Carnap published it in response to...
£100
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CARON, Jean-Charles-Félix.
Compendium institutionum philosophiae, in quo de rhetorica et philosophia, tractatur. Ad usum candidatorum...
Paris, N. M. Tilliard, 1770.
Very uncommon guide, by the Parisian surgeon Jean-Charles-Félix Caron, to the philosophy student in the University of Paris needs to know in order to graduate first as bachelor and then as master of arts in the university. The work is essentially a kind of bluffer’s guide: “there are people who,...
£750
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[CATHERINE II, Empress of Russia].
Le Czarewitz Chlore. Conte Moral. De main impériale & de maitresse.
Berlin, Fréderic Nicolaï, Lausanne, François Grasset, 1782.
First edition, very rare, of a speculum principis of the Enlightenment, by one of the time’s most enlightened monarchs. Le Czarewitz Chlore is a moral tale written by Catherine II of Russia for her two grandsons, the future Alexander I and his younger brother Constantine, while their father and mother,...
£3000
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[CAVALLERI, Paolo Agostino.]
Lettera dall’Adriatico del signor Antonio Bianchi sopra l’opera de’diritti dell’uomo del sig....
Rome, Giovanni Zempel, 1792 (colophon 1793).
First edition, uncommon, of this counter-revolutionary polemic written in response to Spedalieri’s I diritti dell’uomo of the previous year and attributed to the Barnabite Paolo Agostino Cavalleri (1742-1803). Spedalieri had attempted a Catholic response to the revolutionary ideas of the rights of...
£375
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CHEVALIER, André-Joseph, professor; A.J. BERENTS, compiler.
‘Tractatus De Fide, Spe et Charitate Dictatus ab...
[Douai, 9 March – 4 August] 1787.
A manuscript treatise concerning the three theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity as expounded in Thomas Aquinas’s Summa theologiae, compiled by a student at the University of Douai from lectures by André-Joseph Chevalier.
£375
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CHRYSOSTOM, John.
[Opera: Homeliae.] Que in secundo Ioannis Chrisostomi volumine continentur: Super Mattheum homelie 89 …...
Venice, Stagnino & de Gregoriis, 1503.
First edition of Chrysostom’s Opera omnia, the second volume (of two), annotated throughout by two critical readers.
£2800
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COMTE, Auguste.
Cours de philosophie positive.
Paris, Bachelier, 1830-1842.
First edition, an attractive set, of Comte’s principal work, the outline of positivism. In the course of six volumes Comte sets out the terms of a new sociology and its status in relations to the other fields of knowledge. In fact it is in the forty-seventh lesson that the neologism ‘sociologie’...
£1600
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COMTE, Auguste, and Albert CROMPTON (editor).
Confessions and Testament of August Comte: and his correspondence with...
Liverpool, Young, 1910.
First edition in English of Comte’s Confessions, which first appeared with his ‘testament’ in French in 1884. These take the form of ‘Twelve Saint Clotildes’, a series of annual confessions which he recited to his muse’s grave. Clotilde de Vaux was a divorced woman whom Comte met...
£80
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COPPENS, Charles.
A brief text-book of logic and mental philosophy.
New York, Schwartz, Kirwin & Fauss, 1891.
First edition of Coppens’s text-book, written in response to Leo XIII’s injunction to ‘establish not only a well-adapted and solid method of instruction, but a method in perfect conformity with the Catholic faith, especially as regards Mental Philosophy, on which the right teaching of all the other...
£30
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CORTÈS, Gioacchino.
Dissertazione anti-Bolgeniana sopra la carità difesa dal suo autore l’abate Gioacchino Cortes contro...
Rome, Salomoni, 1793.
First edition of this response to and attempted refutation of Bolgeni’s Della carità o amor di Dio by the Spanish Jesuit Joachim Cortès. Della carità was the best-known work of the Jesuit theologian and controversialist Gianvincenzo Bolgeni, in which he had argued, against...
£450
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[COYER; VOLTAIRE; WAR OF THE AUSTRIAN SUCCESSION.]
‘Recueil des Pieces’.
France, 1744-1749.
An extraordinary sammelband of seventy-five pamphlets – twenty-seven of which are recorded in only three or fewer libraries on OCLC – mostly relating to successful French exploits throughout Europe during the War of the Austrian Succession, including the Dutch and Italian campaigns and the...
£5500
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[DEATH OF REASON].
Oracion funebre dicha en las Exêquias del Ente de Razon.
Barc[elona], Pedro Gomita. c.1787.
Barcelona printing, in the same year as the first, of this speech given in competition at the Provincial Chapter of the Franciscans in Malaga, offering a funereal eulogy for Reason.
£215
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DESCARTES, René, and Louis de la FORGE (editor).
Tractatus de homine, et de formatione foetus.
Amsterdam, Daniel Elzevir, 1677.
First and only Elzevir edition, and the first edition of the better Latin text of Descartes’s Traité de l’homme. De homine ‘is the first work in the history of science and medicine to construct a unified system of human physiology that presents man as a purely material and...
£1100
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DESLANDES, André-François Boureau.
Dying Merrily: or, historical and critical Reflexions on the Conduct of great Men in all Ages,...
London: Printed for M. Cooper ... 1745.
First edition of this translation of Réfléxions sur les grands hommes que sont morts en plaisantant (1712), by the philosopher and naval official André-François Deslandes (1670–1757), an important precursor of the Encyclopédistes.
£450
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DIOGENES LAERTIUS, [and Henri ESTIENNE (editor)].
Περι βίων, δογμάτων και αποφθεγμων...
[Geneva,] Henri Estienne, 1570.
First Estienne edition of The Lives of the Philosophers, a very important edition in the original Greek, ‘in which appear for the first time many passages discovered in manuscripts by Estienne’. ‘The volume also contains thirty-six pages of important textual annotations by Henri Estienne,...
£1400
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[DODSLEY, Robert, et al.]
The Oeconomy of Human Life, in two parts, translated from an Indian manuscript, written by a...
Newport, J. Mallett, 1783.
Rare printing, undertaken in Newport on the Isle of Wight by James Mallett. Only nine publications are listed in ESTC as Mallett, Newport: mostly occasional endeavours, undertaken in 1767, 1770, 1782, 1783 (two publications, including ours), 1784 and 1789 (three publications), and almost all...
£450
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DOLCE, Lodovico.
Somma della filosofia a’Aristotele, e prima della dialettica. [with:] Somma di tutta la natural filosofia di...
Venice, Giovanni Battista, & Marchio Sessa, & fratelli, [1565].
First edition of this exposition of Aristotle’s dialaectics, moral, and natural philosophy by ‘one of the major transmitters of culture in cinquecento Italy’ (Ronnie H. Terpening, Lodovico Dolce: Renaissance Man of Letters, 1997).
£5500
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DONNE, John.
Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, and severall Steps in my Sicknes ...
London, Printed for Thomas Jones … 1627.
Third (and last lifetime) edition of Donne’s most familiar prose work, composed during his convalescence in 1623–4 from the ‘spotted Feaver’ which nearly killed him. It consists of twenty-three ‘Stationes, sive Periodi in Morbo’, each comprising a meditation, expostulation, and prayer.
£13500