A Library and a Garden – a Visit to Susimetsa, August 31 – September 2, 2025
A library and garden – although Cicero’s words (“si hortum in bibliotheca habes, deerit nihil” – If you have a garden and a library, you will lack nothing. Ad Familiares (Letters to Friends) IX, Letter IV. to Varro) have, by now, turned into a calendar motto, they are as true as they have ever been since Cicero made that remark in a letter to his friend.
The horticultural fashion and the libraries have dramatically changed; yet even today, Susimetsa is a place that offers essentially everything a philosopher could reasonably wish for – with the advantages of modern technology, such as Wi-Fi available in the villa: a rich library, including not only philosophical works, set within a vast and beautiful garden landscape containing a pond with fish where at night elusive frogs give their concert under the starry sky. (If only Kant could have heard that – perhaps his saying about the starry sky above and the moral law within would have included a remark about nature, who knows.)
In any case, here we are, four scholars working in the history of philosophy, arriving in Susimetsa after a conference that we co-organized at the University of Tartu in cooperation with the University of Würzburg: Roomet Jakapi, associate professor of the history of philosophy from the University of Tartu; Sonja Schierbaum, leader of the research group “Practical Reasons Before Kant (1720-1780)”; Gareth Paterson, a junior research fellow at the Chair of History of Philosophy in Tartu, formerly a member of the Würzburg research group where he began his doctoral thesis (now continued in Tartu under the joint supervision of Roomet Jakapi and Sonja Schierbaum); and Jon Bornholdt, a collaborator in the Würzburg research group.
We have been in close contact, via Zoom, but now were meeting for the first time “in person.” The idea was that the jointly organized conference on “Probability and the Soul – Metaphysical and Epistemological Issues in German and British Early Modern Philosophy” could mark the beginning of further fruitful cooperation between Tartu and Würzburg in philosophy, with a DAAD-funded student exchange having recently been initiated. To talk about further plans and cooperations – what better place could there be than Susimetsa!
There is something Cicero did not explicitly mention in his letter, but what he would probably have agreed with, shown by the very fact that he was addressing a friend: Having a library, a garden is fine, but it is even better if you also have good company. Being in Susimetsa with colleagues, and friends even, in that atmosphere, can strike sparks. It was both a great privilege and a great pleasure to be there. If only we could have stayed longer. In any case, we strongly hope to be able to return in the nearer future – Susimetsa being a Sehnsuchtsort (place of longing), not only for philosophers!
