Epilogue: Translatio Studiorum in the Future

Let us imagine a young researcher who is under contract with a publisher for a volume on, say, “cosmopolitanism.” He or she will first delve into a mass of critical editions, translations, monographs, articles, and encyclopedias, as well as online references. The outcome will be a seventy-page booklet, of which two hundred copies will be printed and read by a similar number of researchers, lecturers and members of the public. The example shows, however, how researchers, publishers, and readers used to work in the twentieth century. We are now in the twenty-first and we can do so much better. We can think of relying very soon on a hypertext of philosophical and scientific sources, which will provide metadata-rich and fully interoperable sources, translations, bibliographies, indexes, lexica, and encyclopedias. Users will begin at the top level by perusing general narratives, from where they will follow the links to details of critical editions, their translations in at least six languages, articles, indices, and monographs. It will produce an ongoing transactive exchange of information, debate and knowledge among students of all faculties and scholars, thus helping to increase knowledge and appreciation among citizens—especially young people—of their shared yet diverse cultural heritage.