Best of us all the best he be leic, go go, the Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy Podcast, brought to you with

the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the

LMU in Munich, online at History of Philosophy.net.

Today's episode, Collectors items, Fotius and Byzantine compilations.

Like Rodney Dangerfield, obsessive collectors get no respect.

The word train spotter, which refers to a railway enthusiast, is in British English, synonymous with loser,

and there is indeed something slightly tragic about someone who spends all their free time looking for things the rest of us find pointless. We've all shaped our faces into a frozen smile and uttered a forest, wow, when being shown, say, a neighbor's collection of Star Wars figurines or a cousin's treasure trove of memorabilia from the career of Donnie and Marie Osmond.

At such moments, I remind myself that I too am prone to the collector's impulse.

I refer not to my complete edition of Buster Keaton's

silent films, for which I make no apologies, but to my embarrassingly large collection of books about

ancient and medieval philosophy. The roots of addiction were planted early in my own career.

When a young man who was considering studying philosophy looked around my office and said,

so I guess you're new here. When I asked how he knew this he said,

so I guess you're new here.

When I asked how he knew this, he said,

because you hardly have any books.

That was about 20 years ago.

Nowadays, a visitor might reasonably conclude

that I am preparing for a cataclysm in which all of Western civilization is destroyed with the lucky exception of my office, so that future historians will be able to reconstruct the early history of philosophy using nothing but my private library.

What they will make of my plastic dancing James Brown doll, I hesitate to guess.

In my defense, I would point out that collectors of the distant past achieved more or less exactly what I just described. We owe much of our knowledge about antiquity to obsessive collectors whose efforts defied civilizational collapse, preserving precious texts and information like Noah saving the animals aboard his arc.

Pride of place, at least as concerns the history of classical philosophy, must go to

...