Sunday 16 January 2011

De Smet material

For the record:

- I have asked at the JDV Registrar's Office for copies of De Smet's Latin notes (Metaphysica Generalis, etc.); they told me they had disposed of all matter from the pre-Vatican days, because there was simply too much junk accumulating.

- The bound typescripts of De Smet's articles (4 or 5 volumes) reserved in the JDV Library, which Banzelao Teixeira had found, and of which he had made copies (which I have in my possession), seem to have disappeared. When I went to check them last year, they were not to be found. The Librarian and his assistants did not know what had happened to them.

- It is just possible that some of De Smet's students might have retained the Latin notes. Asking around for them, last year at Boston Charles O. Oduke, SJ, a student of F.X. Clooney's, put me in touch with Antonio de Nicolas, the brother of the current Jesuit General. He had been a student of De Smet's in Pune, but he told me he did not have copies of the notes. (De Nicolas is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at SUNY, Stonybrook. His book Habits of the Mind is dedicated to De Smet.)

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