Description

The Istituto per il Lessico Intellettuale Europeo e la Storia delle Idee (ILIESI) is dedicated to the history of cultural and scientific terminology. ILIESI focuses on the phenomenon of cultural migration, which accompanies the whole history of civilizations while involving continuous relations and reciprocal exchanges among diverse cultures, and thus translations (in their widest sense) of texts and modules from one to another context, be it linguistic, economic, political, or cultural. Its researchers investigate several epochs under the assumption that at the root of the history of philosophy and of the sciences and more generally of the history of ideas lie textual corpora that have been developed in the context of each discipline over the centuries. Historical semantic tools consider technical uses and ambiguities, synchronic and diachronic inter-relations, translations and transpositions across lexical fields. The specificity of their methodology requires keeping close to texts, individual terms and lexical families. Hence the publication of lexica, indices and concordances, the setting-up of data-bases and scientific data processing applied to technical terminology in the humanities. Current lines of research embrace the history of European cultural terminology in connection with the Greek, Latin, Hebrew and Arab tradition, the history of Ideas, ICT methods for textual analysis. Agora (ICT Policy Support), Open Scholarly Communities on the Web (Cost Action 32), and PHerc (ERC Starting Grant) are the EC projects it hosted. ILIESI is partner with philosophers, historians of science and linguists all over Europe and the US and with research teams of the CNRS, CSIC, CNPq, MPI and the Library of Congress.