Talk:Gerard van Swieten
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Article Significantly Flawed
editThis article is a carbon copy of the German wikipedia article, which is full of inaccuracies.
"Abhandlung des Daseyns der Gespenster (or Discourse on the Existence of Ghosts)" is not the title of his work. It is the title of a work by an anonymous Bavarian author. This work was published in 1768, and the publisher thought it was a good idea to add van Swietens (older and probably well-known) essay (from 1755/56) to this work. No copyright laws back then.
The article does not make it clear that the following quotation is not by van Swieten, but by the above-mentioned publisher: "that all the fuss doesn't come from anything else than a vain fear, a superstitious credulity, a dark and eventful imagination, simplicity and ignorance among the people."
All this makes me beleive that there are even more inaccuracies in this article, and that it needs to be urgently re-written by someone with explicit knowledge of van Swieten.