Interesting Copies of Kant’s First Critique and Leibniz’s Discourse

A few weeks before I first went up to university, I was given a haul of old philosophy books by a relative of a family friend. Among them were two very tired volumes full of arachnidan annotations and odd scraps of paper (something I tend to consider a plus).

First, Leibniz, George R. Montgomery (transl.), Discourse on Metaphysics, etc. (Chicago: Open Court, 1931), with the front cover fallen off but still present; second, Kant, Norman Kemp Smith (transl.), Critique of Pure Reason (London: Macmillan, 1929), with the front cover fallen off and left who knows where. The latter is a first edition of Kemp Smith’s notable translation, and so a very nice thing, but in a bad state.

The annotations in both volumes are in the same (quite pert, tense) hand, which a signature inside Leibniz’s front cover suggests belongs to David Savan. Savan was a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto from the forties through eighties, and a specialist in C. S. Peirce and Spinoza. He has a Wiki page; and T. L. Short’s “David Savan’s Peirce Studies” is in Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 22 2 (Spring, 1986), pp. 89–124.

In the Critique is a list of key terms in German and a tear-out-and-return slip for the War Amputations of Canada Key Tag Service (“Use this form for extra tags only”). Was Savan a veteran? An amputee?

And in the Discourse is a little index of page-references and a larger scrap covered on both sides with what look to me like lecture-notes: “Possibility—U. of Cal. 1933…”