Review: by André Cossette and translated by Rory Litwin

Humanism and Libraries: An Essay on the Philosophy of Librarianship by Andre Cossette, translated by Rory Litwin. Duluth, MN: Library Juice Press, 2009. 102 pp. ISBN 9781936117178. The 2009 translation of Andre Cossette’s Humanism and Libraries: An Essay on the Philosophy of Librarianship into English from the original French was timely. Written in accordance with the curriculum of the Graduate School of Library Science at the Universite de Montreal, it was first published by L’Association pour l’avancement des sciences et des techniques de la documentation (ASTED) in 1976, under the title Humanisme et bibliotheques: essaisur la philosophie de la bibliotheconomie (Montreal). It is a short polemic, intense in its ability to be thought provoking while addressing central issues of the field, such as the roles that libraries fundamentally serve in terms of education, democracy, and society. Cossette’s main argument wavers from a position that celebrates a liberal progressivism, affirmative of the benefits of the empirical, to one that flirts with critical theory. I will elaborate on this last position more fully. Cossette begins with a call to a “philosophy of librarianship” in order to draw out a moral imperative defined by the field as having a sense of purpose in order to better serve the benefit of society. This, as noted in the introduction of the book, seems to be tied more to a critical understanding of philosophy than the logos-driven pragmatism of American information science. He goes as far as to place Dr. Shiyali Ramamrita Ranganathan’s writings neatly in the camp of positivism, but “expressed in a philosophical language” (p. 13). This has the reader thinking the essay will be a polemic that argues for the reduction of the more scientifically oriented research in the theoretical division of the library science profession, implying that the current state of empirical methodology in the profession carries the potential to stifle the field, particularly in terms of its ability to establish a higher purpose. This impression is particularly strong in Cossette’s own reductive presentation of the fundamental divisions between science and philosophy. It is here that Cossette creates a binary. He describes the positivistic aspects of the experimental or scientific method and phenomenological interpretations that place a disproportionate amount of dependence upon the causal, or the “how” of “facts” and “events,” and hence, those based solely upon the “evidentiary.” He contrasts this with the philosophical, in which a more “reflective method” allows for the human as the subject and its capacity for the semantic creation of meaning (pp. 6- 10). In this, he describes a move away from a scenario where the human subject is treated as an object of study by an objective observer. However, Cossette, in

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