Philology, as Stephen Nichols suggests in his introductory remarks, has come to be equated in the minds of many with a dessicated and dogmatic textual praxis which, through the minutious methodologies of paleography, historical grammar, and the textual criticism of “Monsieur Procuste, Philologue,” has reduced medieval literary “monuments” to the status of “documents.” The Oxford Roland, in my initial philological encounter with it, was alternately a subtext for deciphering sound laws or a node in a tree diagram mapping the (...) scriptural genesis of a legend. And there it ended. (shrink)

Mauro Zonta's long awaited work Il Commento medio di Averroè alla Metafisica di Aristotele nella tradizione ebraica is really three books in one: a historical and philological account of the two medieval Hebrew translations of Averroes' Middle Commentary on Aristotle's Metaphysics and editions of both translations. The Arabic of Averroes' Middle Commentary on Aristotle's Metaphysics is not extant apart from a few fragments (see vol. 1, pp. 13-5). Nor is there a direct Latin translation of the Arabic—indeed, Zonta states (...) that there is no evidence of reliable citations of the work by any Latin authors (vol. 1, p. 18). Zonta's book, then, presents the only way of accessing Averroes' monumental work in its .. (shrink)

In medieval studies, philology is the matrix out of which all else springs. So we scarcely need to justify the choice of philology as a topic for the special forum to which Speculum, in a historic move, has opened its pages. On the other hand, if philology is so central to our discipline, why should one postulate a “new” philology, however ironically? While each contributor answers this question in a different, though complementary, way, the consensus seems to be that (...) medieval philology has been marginalized by contemporary cognitive methodologies, on the one side, while within the discipline itself, a very limited and by now grossly anachronistic conception of it remains far too current. This version, formulated under the impulse of political nationalism and scientific positivism during the second half of the nineteenth century, continues to circumscribe the “discipline” of medieval studies. The forum presented here undertakes to explore and interrogate presuppositions underlying current philological practices. (shrink)

The studies that make up this book were written and brought together to honor the memory of Jan Pinborg. His unexpected death in 1982 at the age of forty-five shocked and saddened students of medieval philosophy everywhere and left them with a keen sense of disappoint ment. In his fifteen-year career Jan Pinborg had done so much for our field with his more than ninety books, editions, articles, and reviews and had done it all so well that we recognized (...) him as a leader and counted on many more years of his scholarship, his help, and his friendship. To be missed so sorely by his international colleagues in an academic field is a mark of Jan's achievement, but only of one aspect of it, for historians of philosophy are not the only scholars who have reacted in this way to Jan's death. In his decade and a half of intense productivity he also acquired the same sort of special status among historians of linguistics, whose volume of essays in his memory is being G. L. Bursill-Hall almost simultane published under the editorship of ously with this one. Sten Ebbesen, Jan's student, colleague, and successor as Director of the Institute of Medieval Greek and Latin Philology at the University of Copenhagen, has earned the gratitude of all of us by memorializing Jan 1 in various biographical sketches, one of which is accompanied by a 2 complete bibliography of his publications. (shrink)

As the following remarks are to reflect my own scholarly commitment and experience, I should begin by saying that they come from a medievalist who in his work is always conscious of dealing with the works of a past state of civilization. They also come from a historian of literature, who in contrast to political or economic historians makes written documents the subject of his study, and who in contrast to linguists looks at them as works of verbal art. And (...) finally, they come from a professor of English literature who works closely with colleagues whose ultimate aim is the aesthetic analysis and appraisal of verbal objects, and of whom many today feel driven to ask deeper theoretical questions about, not only the nature of aesthetic values, but the nature of language itself and its function to communicate “meaning,” about the relation between object and perceiver, about the psychological or political function of literature and of language, and so on. Working in such an environment naturally brings with it a certain amount of confrontation, which in turn has its occasional political side in discussions about such practical matters as departmental curricula and new appointments. Though I would not rank myself among philologists who have little use for literary criticism and theory, I can of course not help being conscious of pressures and of attitudes on the other side — however unvoiced they may remain — that would reject “philology.” Hence, my remarks will reflect a practitioner's concern with what philology is and with what continuing value for the study of medieval literature it has. (shrink)

In this article, the identification in different civilizations and eras of some cir-umpolar stars as the north pole star are reviewed, the main principles behind and crucial considerations in the past for forming the criteria for north pole star identification are scrutinized, and some profound differences in ancient and medieval views of it are discussed. The point of departure is the identification of the north polar star in Euclid’s Phaenomena as the star HR 4646, and its identification in the (...) Pahlavi Bundahišn and al-Ṣūfī’s Ṣuwar al-kawākib as HR 4893. Because of the inevitable transitory nature of the north pole star, the location of al-Ṣūfī’s north pole star in the manuscript tradition of his magnum opus during the centuries after him is also investigated in detail. A supplementary discussion is included on the confusion between two different entities—the pole of the celestial sphere and the pivot of an indigenous Arabic asterism envisioned as a millstone—in philological, lexical, and literary Islamic works, which chiefly stems from the vague terminology employed. (shrink)

In Science of the Soul in Ibn Sina's Pointers and Reminders, Michael A. Rapoport provides a philological and interpretive guide for critically reading and interpreting Ibn Sina's (Avicenna, d. 1037) most challenging and influential text. Rapoport argues that chapters VII-X of the Pointers present scientific explanations for phenomena related to the human soul - from intellection to divination, magic, and marvels - within the framework of Ibn Sina's Metaphysics of the Rational Soul. This book dispels widespread notions that the Pointers (...) represents Ibn Sina's mystical or Sufi philosophy and therefore stands apart from the rest of his corpus. (shrink)

In the late first and early second millennia, mainland Southeast Asians created sophisticated techniques to accurately and efficiently render Pali into local vernaculars, including Burmese, Khmer, Khün, Lanna, Lao, Lü, Mon, and Siamese. These techniques for vernacular reading, parallel to approaches for reading Latin in medieval Europe and Literary Sinitic in Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, led to the development of bitexts that contained a mix of Pali and vernacular material. Such bitexts, arranged in both interlinear and interphrasal formats, gradually (...) allowed second-millennium Southeast Asian writers to sprout a vernacular literature from the established branches of Pali genres. Bitexts themselves formed the basis for a new literary style that stemmed from the techniques of vernacular reading, a style that set the standard for belles-lettres until the early twentieth century. The spread of Pali-vernacular bitexts in Southeast Asia allowed for the literary elevation of the vernacular without renouncing the cosmopolitan idiom of Pali. To support these arguments, this article draws on some of the earliest examples of bitexts in Central Thailand and Northern Thailand. These include a hitherto undeciphered form of manuscript annotation in seventeenth- to nineteenth-century Siam; two of the oldest palm-leaf documents surviving in any Tai language, from sixteenth-century Lanna; and the oldest known Pali-Siamese literary work, thought to be composed in 1482. These bitexts provide detailed evidence for vernacular reading and the emergence of vernacular literature in mainland Southeast Asian in general and Thailand in particular. (shrink)

Philology is a term of wide application, designating at its most narrow the study of specific linguistic and textual features, at its most extensive what Gustav Gröber, in the Grundriβ der romanischen Philologie , called “the human spirit in language.” The distance between these definitions measures the literary medievalist's task: on the one hand to engage in the disinterested and often highly technical practices of medieval studies, on the other to produce results of general interest. These imperatives converge with (...) a slightly different but analogous dilemma, the relation of medieval studies to the human sciences as a whole. On the one hand, as the custodian of the formative history of the cultures of the European nation states, and as the agency by which the study of the national literatures first entered the academy in the nineteenth century, medieval studies has provided a model for cultural study. Yet in the current academic milieu, at least in the Anglo-American world, medieval studies is a marginalized institution. Most literary scholars and critics consider medieval texts to be utterly extraneous to their own interests, as at best irrelevant, at worst inconsequential; and they perceive the field itself as a site of pedantry and antiquarianism, a place to escape from the demands of modern intellectual life. (shrink)

Senshu University has hosted many international conferences on medieval English literature - primarily on Geoffrey Chaucer and William Langland - as well as in the related fields of Old Germanic, medieval French and Renaissance Italian literature. These international collaborations inform and contribute to the present volume, which addresses the heritage bequeathed to medieval English language and literature by the classical world.<BR> This volume explores the development of medieval English literature in light of contact with Germanic and (...) Old Norse cultures, on the one hand, and Romance languages, on the other. The book includes a comparative study of <I>Beowulf in the Germanic context, discusses aspects of <I>Piers Plowman and its tradition, and offers philological approaches to Chaucer (especially his <I>Troilus and Criseyde). The articles assembled here collectively suggest how the torches of classical learning were carried from continental Europe to illuminate the pages of medieval English literature. (shrink)

This article explores the long-contested question about the role of individual judgement vis-à-vis the authority of tradition in the interpretation of the Qurʾān. It focuses on the notion of al-tafsīr bi-l-raʾy – interpretation of the Qurʾān by “personal opinion” – and offers an insight into medieval Muslim debates over the legitimacy of this type of exegesis, its alleged prophetic disapproval, and the scope and conditions of its use. Based on the Sunnī tafsīr works from the 3rd/9th to the 6th/12th (...) centuries, the article examines how in the course of these debates Muslim authors negotiated the meaning of al-tafsīr bi-l-raʾy. Against the view that it encompassed any interpretation beyond tradition-based tafsīr, their reinterpretations of the term implied that philological, juridical, and Ṣūfī tafsīr could not be categorized as al-tafsīr bi-l-raʾy, thereby narrowing the meaning of this concept and broadening the scope of legitimate exegesis and interpretative authorities in Sunnī tafsīr tradition. (shrink)

The studies that make up this book were written and brought together to honor the memory of Jan Pinborg. His unexpected death in 1982 at the age of forty-five shocked and saddened students of medieval philosophy everywhere and left them with a keen sense of disappoint­ment. In his fifteen-year career Jan Pinborg had done so much for our field with his more than ninety books, editions, articles, and reviews and had done it all so well that we recognized him (...) as a leader and counted on many more years of his scholarship, his help, and his friendship. To be missed so sorely by his international colleagues in an academic field is a mark of Jan's achievement, but only of one aspect of it, for historians of philosophy are not the only scholars who have reacted in this way to Jan's death. In his decade and a half of intense productivity he also acquired the same sort of special status among historians of linguistics, whose volume of essays in his memory is being G. L. Bursill-Hall almost simultaneously ­ published under the editorship of with this one. Sten Ebbesen, Jan's student, colleague, and successor as Director of the Institute of Medieval Greek and Latin Philology at the University of Copenhagen, has earned the gratitude of all of us by memorializing Jan 1 in various biographical sketches, one of which is accompanied by a 2 complete bibliography of his publications. (shrink)

La presente versión del tratado De Bono Habitu Liber o El libro sobre la buena condición, de Galeno de Pérgamo, se presenta al lector de habla hispana como un acercamiento a la prolífca obra flosófca de quien fuera reconocido en su época como un notable médico anatomista y físico. Los argumentos expuestos por el autor acerca de la ‘buena condición’ dan cuenta de la infuencia retórica de Platón y Aristóteles, al mismo tiempo, de las enseñanzas médicas de Hipócrates. Junto al (...) texto original y la traducción al español, se ofrece una versión en latín empleada en el proceso de traducción como un apoyo para resolver las difcultades textuales y léxicas que presentaba el texto griego, al permitir confrontar una recepción medieval del tratado. (shrink)

The Altdeutsche Textbibliothek [Old German Text Library] is the series of editions of German medieval texts with the richest history. Foundedin 1881 by Hermann Paul, it has been edited by leading Germanists- Georg Beasecke, Hugo Kuhn, Burghart Wachinger. Since 2001, responsibility for the series has rested with Christian Kiening. In the meantime, the series comprises some 120 volumes, with an exemplary combination of closeness to the original manuscript(s) with ease of reading, philological accuracy with concern for university teaching. It (...) includes recognised editions of "classical" authors from around 1200- some with commentary- but also presents veritable editions of authors' works (Notker the German) and high-quality new editions (Eckenlied, Heinrich von dem Türlin). (shrink)

"The twelve chapters of this volume all began their existence as contributions to workshops held between 2009 and 2011 by a Danish-Swedish research network called The Aristotelian Tradition: The reception of Aristotle's works on logic and metaphysics in the Middle Ages, headquartered in Gothenburg and funded by the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation. Most of them were written by members of the network, some by invited speakers. While the volume amply illustrates the set of scholarly approaches characteristic of the "Copenhagen (...) School of Medieval Philosophy" (notably a strong philological foundation and an interest in ancient as well as medieval and Greek as well as Latin texts), its thematic diversity reflects the network's breadth of interests. What unites the chapters in this respect is simply a concern with different historical manifestations of Aristotelian thought on logical and metaphysical matters. The volume includes studies of texts by, among others, Apuleius, Boethius, Anonymus Aurelianensis III, Michael of Ephesus, Averroes, Anonymus Cantabrigiensis, Nicholas of Paris, Robert Kilwardby, Anonymus O, Thomas Aquinas, William of Ockham, and Francisco Suárez, relating to themes and passages in Aristotle's Categories, On Interpretation, Prior Analytics 1, Posterior Analytics 1, Sophistical Refutations and Metaphysics A and Z. The last two chapters consist of a new edition, with English translation and commentary, of the first part of a fiercely anti-Aristotelian work, which has been described as the starting-point for Renaissance Platonism and Aristotelianism alike: George Gemistos Plethon's On Aristotle's Departures from Plato."--. (shrink)

In philology, both 'sincerity' and 'cheng' primarily mean, 'to be true to oneself'. As a philosophical term, 'sincerity' roots in Aristotle's 'aletheutikos'. In medieval Europe, it is regarded as a neutral value that may either serve or disserve for 'truth.' As for Romantics, it is a positive value, and an individualistic concept whose two elements 'true' and 'self' refer to a person's 'true feeling' and 'individuality'. In contrast, both 'self' and 'true' in Confucianism are universalistic concepts, meaning 'good nature' (...) common to all humans, and 'true feeling' distinguishing them from beasts. Cheng itself means to face one's universal self with universal true feeling. (shrink)

A considerable part of the work of Brentano from his youth to the end of his life is concerned with the thought of Aristotle. His peculiar way to access Aristotle makes of Brentano a rather eccentric figure among the nineteenth and early twentieth century’s Aristotelian scholarship. On the one hand, he doesn’t reject emphasizing the use of philological and historical resources in order to understand ancient texts and indeed he makes extensive use of them himself; on the other hand, he (...) believes that the main guide for the study of ancient philosophy should be a philosophical hermeneutics. Therefore, he develops a sharp criticism against Zeller and other scholars. Is for this reason that Brentano considered medieval scholastics as more appropriate interpreters of classical philosophy than them, in particular Aquinas. In our remarks, we will seek to review the main features of the method for interpreting Aristotle defended by Brentano. (shrink)

Salomon Munk (1803-1867) belonged to a group of German-Jewish scholars who pioneered the systematic study of Arabic, Judeo-Arabic and Islamic philosophy in Western Europe in the nineteenth century, as part of a movement that came to be known as the Science of Judaism. The Science of Judaism applied the tools of modern science (in particular philology) to the study of Judaism, seeking to shed light on its manifold aspects and historical contexts--an undertaking which eventually led to the birth of Jewish (...) studies as an academic discipline. Munk's ground-breaking studies of Arabic and Judeo-Arabic sources were to play a central role in this process, exerting a major influence on nineteenth century German and French Oriental studies as well as on modern philosophical historiography, and paving the way for the scientific study of the relationship between medieval Jewish, Islamic, and Christian thought. This book is an attempt to restore this extraordinary representative of German Jewry to the pantheon of the Science of Judaism, and in the process, to illustrate the fascinating origins of the academic field of Jewish and Islamic Studies. (shrink)

"Mr. Bloch has attempted to establish what he calls a 'literary anthropology.' The project is important and ambitious. It seems to me that Mr. Bloch has completely achieved this ambition." –Michel Foucault "Bloch's Study is a genuinely interdisciplinary one, bringing together elements of history, ethnology, philology, philosophy, economics and literature, with the undoubted ambition of generating a new synthesis which will enable us to read the Middle Ages in a different light. Stated simply, and in terms which do justice neither (...) to the density nor the subtlety of his argument, Bloch's thesis is this: that medieval society perceived itself in terms of a vertical mode of descent from origins. This model is articulated etymologically in medieval theories of grammar and language, and is consequently reflected in historical and theological writings; it is also latent in the genealogical structure of the aristocratic family as it began to be organized in France in the twelfth century, and is made manifest in such systems of signs as heraldry and the adoption of patronymns.... It is an ingenious and compelling synthesis which no medievalist, even on this side of the Atlantic, can afford to ignore." –Nicholas Mann, Times Literary Supplement. (shrink)

This essay reflects on the future of world history by reflecting on its past. It looks to how Iberian historiography in the early modern period “rediscovered” Islamic historiography in the course of Portuguese expansion into the Indian Ocean region in the sixteenth century. However, since the Iberians had deliberately cultivated a form of amnesia regarding this historiography as a result of the so-called Reconquest, new modes and methods of appropriation had to be found. Further, whereas medieval contact had largely (...) been with materials in Arabic, the sixteenth-century world was far more centrally concerned with materials in Persian. The essay proposes that these materials and their perspective had a significant impact on humanist historians such as João de Barros as well as on their successors. Equally, access to European historical writings in Latin had some impact on Indo-Persian chroniclers at the Mughal court and elsewhere. However, it may be argued that an even greater impact on the Mughals was that of “Hindu” writings regarding the ancient past of India. All in all, the essay suggests that the past of such historical writing was crucially mediated by philological practice. Nor can philology be neglected for future projects in the writing of world history or global history. The essay thus questions the presumptions of both neoskeptics, who neglect how historians have worked in the past, and of scientistic historians, who oppose the central place of humanistic disciplines in the future writing of history. (shrink)

Avicenna's Metaphysics (in Arabic: Ilâhiyyât) is the most important and influential metaphysical treatise of classical and medieval times after Aristotle. This volume presents studies on its direct and indirect influence in Arabic, Hebrew, and Latin culture from the time of its composition in the early eleventh century until the sixteenth century. Among the philosophical topics which receive particular attention are the distinction between essence and existence, the theory of universals, the concept of God as the necessary being and the (...) theory of emanation. It is shown how authors such as Averroes, Abraham ibn Daud, Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas and John Duns Scotus react to Avicenna's metaphysical theories. The studies also address the philological and historical circumstances of the textual traditionin three different medieval cultures. The studies are written by a distinguished international team of contributors, who convened in 2008 to discuss their research in the Villa Vigoni, Italy. (shrink)

Origin of the German Trauerspiel was Walter Benjamin's first full, historically oriented analysis of modernity. Readers of English know it as "The Origin of German Tragic Drama," but in fact the subject is something else--the play of mourning. Howard Eiland's completely new English translation, the first since 1977, is closer to the German text and more consistent with Benjamin's philosophical idiom. Focusing on the extravagant seventeenth-century theatrical genre of the trauerspiel, precursor of the opera, Benjamin identifies allegory as the constitutive (...) trope of the Baroque and of modernity itself. Allegorical perception bespeaks a world of mutability and equivocation, a melancholy sense of eternal transience without access to the transcendentals of the medieval mystery plays--though no less haunted and bedeviled. History as trauerspiel is the condition as well as subject of modern allegory in its inscription of the abyssal. Benjamin's investigation of the trauerspiel includes German texts and late Renaissance European drama such as Hamlet and Calderón's Life Is a Dream. The prologue is one of his most important and difficult pieces of writing. It lays out his method of indirection and his idea of the "constellation" as a key means of grasping the world, making dynamic unities out of the myriad bits of daily life. Thoroughly annotated with a philological and historical introduction and other explanatory and supplementary material, this rigorous and elegant new translation brings fresh understanding to a cardinal work by one of the twentieth century's greatest literary critics.--. (shrink)

The thesis deals with a section of the major philosophical summa by Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā, d. 1037), namely the Book of the Healing (Kitāb al-Šifāʾ). The summa is structured into four parts, devoted to Logic, Natural Philosophy, Mathematics and Metaphysics; the section at stake is Avicenna’s reworking of Porphyry’s Isagoge (Kitāb al-Madḫal, i.e. “Book of the Introduction”) opening the section of Logic of the Šifāʾ. The thesis is articulated into three main parts, namely (i) an edition of the Arabic text (...) of Avicenna’s Madḫal, (ii) an English translation and (iii) a systematic commentary; these three main parts are preceded by an Introduction (0) divided into two halves: (0a) a General Introduction focused on the doctrinal major innovations of the work and (0b) an Introduction to the Edition of the text, which offers a first comprehensive study of its direct and early indirect tradition and explains the criteria of the edition. (i) The only previous edition of Avicenna’s Madḫal was the one printed in Cairo in 1952 (then reprinted in Tehran in 1983 and in Beirut in 1993), based on ten manuscripts. The huge manuscript tradition of Avicenna’s Madḫal – and, more in general, of Avicenna’s Book of the Healing – is still a matter of investigation. According to the provisional results of the bibliographical research conducted in the present work, it can be estimated that the manuscript tradition of the Madḫal amounts to at least 119 certain witnesses and 14 possible additional witnesses (as explained in the Introduction to the edition, 0b). The text of the Cairo edition, far from being representative of the whole textual tradition, was reconstructed on the basis of ten manuscripts that were not selected on the basis of philological criteria and whose reciprocal stemmatic relations were not clear. Although a critical edition based on all the 119 certain witnesses of the work exceeds the scope of the present work, the edition provided in the thesis takes into account a larger number of manuscripts than the Cairo edition did and, most importantly, selects them by means of a preliminary collation made on portions of the text. The purpose of this preliminary collation is making the selection of the manuscripts employed less arbitrary and providing a reconstruction of their stemmatic relations (in the Introduction, 0b). Overall, 32 manuscripts among the 68 inspected were employed in the edition here proposed, 21 of which were systematically collated and 11 were eliminated as codices descripti. The present edition also assumes as a witness the twelfth-century Latin translation of the work, which is, at the present moment, among the earliest extant witnesses of the text. Hopefully, this editorial work allowed us to improve the text of the Cairo edition in a number of points that are crucial to the correct understanding of Avicenna’s argumentation. (ii) As this project started, complete translations of Avicenna’s Madḫal in modern languages were only available in Turkish and Russian. Chapters of the work had also been translated in other languages, but an English translation of the whole work was still a desideratum. A complete English translation is provided in the thesis, based on the newly-established Arabic text of the work and aiming at preserving the major possible consistency in rendering the relevant philosophical terms. As a complement to the translation, an apparatus of notes is offered to facilitate the immediate understanding of the text. (iii) The third section of the thesis consists in a systematic commentary on Avicenna’s Madḫal, which is meant to support a deeper understanding of the text in its entirety. The commentary deals with both historical and philosophical aspects; more in detail, it includes an analysis and an identification, when possible, of Avicenna’s sources, and underlines the points of major philosophical interest of the work, which are dealt in a more comprehensive manner in the General Introduction (0a). (shrink)

Historical chronology is the discipline that establishes the dates of events and reconstructs the calendars used in ancient, medieval, and early modern times. Traditional accounts state that Joseph Scaliger (1540-1609) created this field by combining philological with astronomical data and techniques. But the celestial phenomena most relevant to chronology are solar and lunar eclipses. From antiquity onwards, astrologers saw these as ominous and connected them to great events on earth. Though Scaliger used dated eclipses in his work, it was (...) a number of relatively obscure sixteenth-century astronomers and scholars who realized that one could date events by eclipses and began doing so in a systematic way, without assigning them any ominous force. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 66.4 (2005) 483-506 [Access article in PDF] Lorenzo Valla and the Traditions and Transmissions of Philosophy C. S. Celenza Johns Hopkins University What is "philosophy"? Who is a "philosopher"? These questions underlay much of Salvatore Camporeale's work, and they are deeper than one might suppose. We can begin with one of Camporeale's favorite figures, Lorenzo Valla, and listen to one of the ways (...) he answered these questions. In the introduction to his work reforming Aristotelian logic, the Repastinatio totius dialectice, Valla situates the debate on wisdom by recalling the case of Pythagoras.1 "What a marvelous praise of modesty it was," Valla wrote, when Pythagoras, asked whether he considered himself wise, replied that he was not "wise," but was rather a "lover of wisdom"—not sophos, but philosophos.2 Valla uses here a humanistic trope, found also in Petrarch's advice to Luigi Marsili, to the effect that Marsili should shape the practice of his life in order to become a "verae sapientiae amator," a "lover of true wisdom."3These citations from Petrarch and Valla alert us to the well-studied fact that, in the view of some humanists, academic "philosophy" had usurped the name "philosophy" and the self-searching meaning behind it. Certain humanists were proposing an alternative notion of what wisdom signified and consequently of what philosophy itself—the "love of wisdom"—represented. It seemed that wisdom needed to be located in a more persuasive way in the world of human beings, history, and language, rather than in one of eternal [End Page 483] suprahuman essences; in short, "philosophy" had to be brought closer to rhetoric and philology.The goal of this paper is to examine this idea in a twofold manner: through the history of terms and concepts as these are refracted by and through the history of institutionalized learning; and through a brief foray into Valla's preface to his great critique of western logic. There has been a lot of challenging and interesting work on this topic in the last few decades. At the same time, there may be cause to wonder whether relatively recent historians have unwittingly become too bogged down in names, failing to see the real conflict. They have tended to assume that the modern, sharp separation of humanistic "disciplines," such as rhetoric and philosophy, existed in the same way and with the same force of conviction in the premodern era. True, there are famous ancient, medieval, and early modern examples of self-defined "philosophers" differentiating themselves from "philologists" and vice versa, most notably Seneca, who—lamenting the professionalization of education in his day—complained in a letter that "what was once philosophy, has become philology" (Ep. 108.23). Yet, the more one investigates this problem, and the more one peers beneath the surface of the seemingly stark divisions between "philosophy" and "philology," the more difficult this strong separation is to maintain.This notion of the possible interpenetrability of "philosophy," and "philology," and "rhetoric" as concepts was probably easier to understand in the Renaissance than it is now. The differences between the Renaissance and our own era lie in institutional context and personal approach, both of which have been, for about six or seven intellectual generations now (but no more than that), supported by a fourfold set of assumptions about what "real" or "professional" philosophy represents: first, that philosophy is primarily about metaphysics and ontology, or rather that there exists a hierarchy in which metaphysics and ontology stand at the top; other things, such as history, language, or rhetoric are "just not philosophy." Second, a retrospectively understood Cartesian split between mind and body is basically true (and that it is legitimate to project that dualistic split back onto thinkers who did not hold the same sort of dualism as axiomatic); and consequently third, that epistemology should be privileged, that is, that knowing and the study of how knowing happens are primarily what philosophy is about. Hence "philosophy" is regulative, a master-discipline that oversees the truth claims of all... (shrink)

Things do not begin to live except in the middle.--Gilles Deleuze, DialoguesA Land of UnlikenessThe English novel The Go-Between begins a tale of memory and loss with two sentences a historian could love: "The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there." The novel's narrator should know: he is a librarian, someone who, as the memory ghost of his twelve-year-old self will remind him, spends his days cataloguing the relics of the book-past. And many who now live with (...) the past for a living might nod in recognition: the metaphor slips on comfortably, like a well-worn shoe. The past can feel like a place as much as it does a time -- a foreign place, outside the doors of the familiar, beyond the gate and the gatekeepers of the now.Especially beyond the pale is the Middle Ages, definitional whipping boy for generations of citizens of the present who have needed an "all-purpose alternative" against which to define themselves. The difference of medieval doing is embedded already in the names we still give the time: the "Middle Ages" makes parenthetical death of the interval between Classical life and its humanist "rebirth." "Premodern" gives life only in anticipation of the modern, directing the period toward a telos of recognizability in the now that the premodern, as such, will always fail to satisfy.The Middle Ages were invented to be a foreign country. The indigenous peoples are dead, and they didn't even know they were medieval -- they thought they were living in modern times. They thought it was now: "There is no other age than ours," Raymond de l'Aire of Tignac told the inquisitors nosing for heresy in his town around 1320.But this is "now," and there are elements about the "Middle Ages" that feel foreign -- foreign in this modern, postmodern, or maybe even post-postmodern land we still call "now." Everyone who has ever read a medieval book cold or taught one to cold undergraduates has felt this foreignness intimately in his or her suddenly awkward flesh. All those quotations, all that Catholicism, all those arguments and counterarguments; not to mention those old words, weird verb forms, erratic spelling, and all that damn Latin.There's no question that the Middle Ages is an other, perhaps even a foreign place, someplace, as the etymology indicates, beyond our own doors . What are we doing when we go there? What happens to "here" and "there" when we go? The question isn't whether medieval people did things differently than we do now; the question is what we as putative nonmedievals are going to do with the difference. What stories do we tell ourselves about it? What do they do to and for us?When medievalists talk about medieval otherness, it can feel like a slap in the face; it can feel like a come-on; it can of course be both at once. Take, for example, Paul Zumthor's monumental Essai de poétique médiévale. Published in 1972, the Essai set medieval poetry in dialogue with what was then high literary theory. The dialogue made the foreignness of medieval poetry accessible to a mid-1980s graduate student like me; it taught me that medieval texts could be active participants in the theoretical discussions I was learning to have with friends, professors, and texts. Returning to the Essai now with the theory-midwifed births of "New Philology" and "New Medievalism" in the past, I was surprised to find that this text that I thought bridged temporal gaps begins by blowing up more bridges than it builds. "We are cut off from the Middle Ages by a divide that we should not attempt to ignore, but that we should rather see as an impassible abyss," Zumthor announces in his second paragraph. Why, then, even write the book, students I once read this with wanted to know, and it's a good question.. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Avicenna’s Metaphysics in ContextTaneli KukkonenRobert Wisnovsky. Avicenna’s Metaphysics in Context. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003. Pp. ix + 305. Cloth, $65.00.The challenges facing the contemporary writer on Arabic philosophy are many, but none more daunting than that of striking a satisfying balance between faithfully reproducing what is there in the text (alongside a lineage of likely sources, perhaps), and actively engaging the materials philosophically. From among the (...) current crop of scholars, the more cautious will argue that as long as we lack critical editions of even basic works, and as long as ambiguities remain concerning who was reading what, where, and when, any ambitious statements regarding the substance of Arabic thought, its development, and (especially) what its distinctive contributions might be, must remain hopelessly premature. The counterargument goes that by refusing the philosophically impatient the licence to speculate, at least, about the relevance of the materials at hand—however rough and ready—one will end up stifling just those endeavours the philologist hopes to promote. For without the promise of philosophical rewards, what incentive remains for the thankless and endless task of textual refinement and identification of sources? Strides made in late ancient and Latin medieval scholarship seem to indicate that philosophical curiosity serves to feed historical acuity, rather than hinder it. Yet with the study of Arabic philosophy the perceived opposition between philosophy and philology has led to a precious few works escaping charges of being found lacking either in textual or philosophical sophistication, or indeed both.To this select company one may now add Robert Wisnovsky's aptly titled Avicenna's Metaphysics in Context. The author pursues a particularly deft course of action: honing in on themes for whose evaluation sufficient materials are available, then infusing his exposition at every turn with philosophical insight and a scholar's eye for detail, Wisnovsky demonstrates by example what a resourceful scholar can accomplish in this day and age. Wisnovsky takes it as his task to situate the very doctrines Abû 'Alî Ibn Sînâ (980-1037) is most famous for—the essence-existence distinction, the distinction between contingent and necessary existence, and the created and embodied yet ultimately separable perfection of the human soul—in a continuous line of discussion stretching from Alexander of Aphrodisias to the kalâm theologians of Avicenna's own age.The resulting narrative threads together a dizzying array of thinkers and discussions, showing just how fertile the scholarship ranging from late antiquity to Arabic thought was, both considered in its original setting and in terms of the contemporary scholarly imagination. Among other things, Wisnovsky's book constitutes the fullest study to date of the [End Page 112] evolution of the concepts of final and efficient causality in the increasingly Neoplatonising interpretations of Aristotle. The cosmological and metaphysical motifs behind these developments are rightly pointed out by Wisnovsky, and their impact on Avicenna's metaphysics of the soul and his views on process and return receive thorough attention.In the midst of all this, sight may be lost of Avicenna's original achievement, and it has to be said that Wisnovsky does not play this aspect up by much. But this, the reader suspects, is part of the point. In order to appreciate a thinker's intellectual prowess it is not necessary to insist that he or she be conjuring up concepts out of thin air. A great mind may instead be a synthetic one, one that is able to negotiate between various conceptual schemes and commitments, and this is the picture Wisnovsky paints of Avicenna. Avicenna's deep engagement with the Peripatetic tradition is evident to any scholar, yet it is often difficult to determine exactly whose opinions he references, as contending viewpoints are typically introduced by enigmatic preambles such as "if it is said... " or, "some contend." Wisnovsky's attention to how terminological shifts reflect philosophical ones succeeds in demonstrating Avicenna's reliance in general not only on ancient sources, but on al-Fârâbi and the kalâm as well. His subtle analysis of the development of key Avicennian doctrines simultaneously serves to lend credence to the picture that is currently emerging concerning the... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Cocceius and the Jewish CommentatorsAdina M. YoffieThe case of Johannes Cocceius defies the commonplace that Leiden University (and perhaps post-Reformation, confessionalized Europe in general) turned away from humanist scholarship in the first quarter of the seventeenth century. In 1650 Cocceius (1603-69), a Bremen-born Oriental philology professor at Franeker, joined the Leiden theological faculty and wrote a treatise, Protheoria de ratione interpretandi sive introductio in philologiam sacram (De ratione). He (...) praised such rabbinic exegetes as Rashi (1040-1105) and David Kimchi (ca. 1160-ca. 1235) in humanist terms for their erudition. At the same time the "new" Cartesian philosophy was taking hold in the arts faculty, and mathematics instruction was encroaching on scholastic formal logic.1 Leiden would become famous for Cartesianism, mathematics, and "Calvinist Copernicanism" in the second half of the seventeenth century, but Cocceius still worked in the tradition of advanced humanist scholarship that had made the institution famous in the sixteenth century.2Leiden's earlier reputation was due in large part to the biblical humanist work of such Renaissance polymaths as Joseph Justus Scaliger (1540-1609) and Hugo Grotius (1583-1645), but by Cocceius's time Leiden theologians were subject to greater Church and State control. As Jonathan Israel and Edwin Rabbie have shown, in response to the controversy that surrounded Jacobus Arminius and his stand on predestination, the Synod of Dordrecht (Dort) drafted an anti-Arminian statement in 1619; any professor who did not sign was subject [End Page 383] to exile from the republic in addition to dismissal from his post.3 Innovative theology, exegesis, and philology suffered as professors, fearing State and Church reprisals, turned to "dogmatic humanism." As Henk Jan de Jonge has explained, this meant that "almost all the theologians of seventeenth-century Leiden who concerned themselves with the explanation of the New Testament placed exegesis at the service of dogmatic objectives."4 Unlike his fellow Leiden theologians, Cocceius pursued biblical humanism and Christian Hebraism through the study of Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic-and he did so in a unique way. He was not the first to use Jewish commentaries and even Jewish post-biblical literature for the purpose of reconstructing the original Hebrew Bible, but he was innovative in praising rabbinic scholars as fellow humanists and in incorporating their scholarship into his Christological exegesis and philosophy. He did so, furthermore, not as an independent scholar or pastor or even as a professor of Hebrew; but as the holder of a university chair in theology at a confessionalized university in a century hostile to his brand of late humanism.Although he came to Leiden as a theologian, Cocceius had impressive training as an Orientalist. He had studied with the famous scholar Sixtinus Amama (1593-1629) and polished his Hebrew and Aramaic by working with a Jewish tutor from Hamburg.5 While still a student at Franeker, Cocceius wrote a translation and commentary of the Talmudic tractate Sanhedrin. A few years later he began composing commentaries on the Pentateuch, and, by the time he arrived at Leiden, he had completed one lecture, series of lectures, or piece of writing on every book of the Old Testament. These commentaries were based not only on Cocceius's extensive knowledge of Oriental languages but also on his readings of medieval Jewish commentators. These were the same commentators that Cocceius would later praise in chapter eight of the De ratione.These humanist achievements were much at variance with Cocceius's public persona as perhaps the most prominent Dutch Calvinist theologian of the seventeenth century. For approximately 100 years after his death in 1669 a faction of Leiden theologians calling themselves "Cocceians" battled the "Voetians," followers of Gisbertus Voetius, for the soul of the Dutch Church.6 At Leiden he lectured on the Pauline Epistles, a typical subject for a seventeenth-century Calvinist theologian, and he worked on his famous theological tract, the salvation-historical Summa doctrinae de foedere et testamento Dei (1648). Neither the De ratione nor his voluminous biblical commentary (except [End Page 384] for a short treatise on the last six chapters of Deuteronomy) was published in Cocceius's lifetime. His son Johann Heinrich released these and his father's... (shrink)