Contributed articles presented at the Seminar, Nietzsche: Philologist, Philosopher, and Cultural Critics held at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi in Nov. 2004.

As philologist and philosopher, Nietzsche paves the way for an understanding of inscriptions and their surfaces, of character strings and their manipulations, without which contemporary research on medial gestures, techniques and dispositives of writing and reading would not be conceivable. The paper shows that and why Nietzsche's own reading and writing revives the practice of ancient : his aphorisms and fragments collect and organize what Nietzsche read and thought, not in order to confine it to the timeframe of its genesis (...) nor to make it an object of exegesis, but to test its potential of being reactivated in discursive practices that bind the subject to a certain truth. (shrink)

The Birth of the Philologist from the Spirit of Schopenhauer’s Philosophy. Nietzsche’s Inaugural Lecture On the Personality of Homer. This essay highlights Schopenhauer’s decisive and unexplored role in Nietzsche’s Über die Persönlichkeit Homers. Following Schopenhauer’s negative assessment of the study of history, Nietzsche criticizes F. A. Wolf’s organic systematization of the sciences of antiquity and foregrounds the aesthetic dimension of philology. Contrary to Wolf, Nietzsche believes that historical investigation is subordinate to the essential pedagogical function of philology; and only through (...) its aesthetic component can philology establish which literary works of antiquity are to be considered truly “classical.” The debate on the Homeric question after the publication of Wolf’s Prolegomena ad Homerum illustrates that philologists have paradoxically become opponents and “destroyers” of the ideal of antiquity. Nietzsche shows how a methodological approach inspired by Schopenhauer’s philosophy can revive the relationship between philology and art. Nietzsche’s arguments to counter Wolf’s thesis about the problem of Homer’s personality implicitly rest on Schopenhauer’s aesthetics. In particular, through Schopenhauer’s conception of genius, Nietzsche rehabilitates the individuality of the poetic author of the Iliad and Odyssey, even though this poet does not correspond to the one referred to as “Homer” in antiquity. (shrink)

In 1889, the German philologist Friedrich Blass isolated a section of Chapter 20 from Iamblichus’ Exhortation to Philosophy (mid- or late 3rd Century CE) as an extract from a lost sophistic or philosophical treatise from the late 5th Century BCE. In this article, I introduce the text, which is now known as 'Anonymus Iamblichi' (or 'the anonymous work preserved in Iamblichus') by appeal to its two main contexts (source preservation and original historical composition), translate and discuss all eight surviving fragments (...) in their entirety, and provide some closing remarks about its importance to this history of democratic thought. The text itself presents a series of very carefully interwoven arguments concerning the three “parts” of excellence (ἀρετή) – wisdom, courage, and eloquence – and their successful application in society. In the course of presenting this case, Anonymus Iamblichi comments on the conditions under which one should learn to be excellent (Fragments 1-2) and the ends to which one should direct one’s excellence (Fragments 3-4); he provides an anthropological discussion of the weaknesses of human psychology and its effects on the good man (Fragments 5-6) and an hypothetical thought experiment concerning the “Superman” (which naturally solicits comparison with Nietzsche’s übermensch) and his inability to overcome the multitude in a lawless state (Fragments 6 and 8); and a positive defense of law and justice, reflecting a pro-democratic philosophical perspective (Fragments 7-8) – a rara avis indeed in ancient philosophy. (shrink)

Victor Klemperer, German philologist and Professor at the University of Dresden, bears testimony to his survival during the Nazi years in his Diaries (1933–1945). Progressively excluded from all social life because of his Jewish religion, Klemperer is forced to recognize himself as a non-subject by the end of the war, calling himself “Nobody” in reference to Ulysses with Polyphemus, the Cyclops. Our article aims to show the mental — cognitive and corporal — process underlying this recognition. Our study will explore (...) the two-pronged thrust of this process: faced with the inexorable destruction of his self, Klemperer has to acknowledge the limits of his analytical capacities. But this extreme experience will enable him to create somatic knowledge destined to recognize what he calls “thought of extinction”. To conclude, we show how this reasoning is based upon action language which consists in naming the body. (shrink)

The German philosopher and philologist Friedrich Ast published this monumental lexicon in three volumes. A professor of classical literature at the University of Landshut and member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, Ast wrote widely on the history of philosophy. He edited a complete edition of Plato with Latin translation, identifying spurious interpolations and false attributions, using this as a basis for his Lexicon. The work is arranged alphabetically, Volume 1 covering Alpha to Epsilon. The entries give citations both from (...) Plato and from later works that extensively quote Plato. Though the Lexicon met with criticism for omissions of particles, prepositions and proper names, and the lack of systematic arrangement, it had a high reputation throughout the nineteenth century. It remains a milestone of Plato scholarship and is an indispensable resource for readers interested in the history of philology and methods in textual criticism. (shrink)

As a philologist, Nietzsche had to be a materialist – a materialist of letters. If letters are not life, however, they are the indices of its limits. You can’t live except at the limit; to get to a limit, you have to reconstruct a genealogy for yourself; once you know where you are, you have the opportunity to lose yourself again, this time effectively. Life is whatever will have greeted you in that loss, the disappearance at the limit.

Extra destinatum -- The philologist and the Epicurean -- Homer atomized -- The pervasive influence.

The German philosopher and philologist Friedrich Ast published this monumental lexicon in three volumes. A professor of classical literature at the University of Landshut and member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, Ast wrote widely on the history of philosophy. He edited a complete edition of Plato with Latin translation, identifying spurious interpolations and false attributions, using this as a basis for his Lexicon. The work is arranged alphabetically, Volume 1 covering Alpha to Epsilon. The entries give citations both from (...) Plato and from later works that extensively quote Plato. Though the Lexicon met with criticism for omissions of particles, prepositions and proper names, and the lack of systematic arrangement, it had a high reputation throughout the nineteenth century. It remains a milestone of Plato scholarship and is an indispensable resource for readers interested in the history of philology and methods in textual criticism. (shrink)

Charles Sanders Peirce was born in September 1839 and died five months before the guns of August 1914. He is perhaps the most important mind the United States has ever produced. He made significant contributions throughout his life as a mathematician, astronomer, chemist, geodesist, surveyor, cartographer, metrologist, engineer, and inventor. He was a psychologist, a philologist, a lexicographer, a historian of science, a lifelong student of medicine, and, above all, a philosopher, whose special fields were logic and semiotics. He is (...) widely credited with being the founder of pragmatism. In terms of his importance as a philosopher and a scientist, he has been compared to Plato and Aristotle. He himself intended "to make a philosophy like that of Aristotle." Peirce was also a tormented and in many ways tragic figure. He suffered throughout his life from various ailments, including a painful facial neuralgia, and had wide swings of mood which frequently left him depressed to the state of inertia, and other times found him explosively violent. Despite his consistent belief that ideas could find meaning only if they "worked" in the world, he himself found it almost impossible to make satisfactory economic and social arrangements for himself. This brilliant scientist, this great philosopher, this astounding polymath was never able, throughout his long life, to find an academic post that would allow him to pursue his major interest, the study of logic, and thus also fulfill his destiny as America's greatest philosopher. Much of his work remained unpublished in his own time, and is only now finding publication in a coherent, chronologically organized edition. Even more astounding is that,despite many monographic studies, there has been no biography until now, almost eighty years after his death. Brent has studied the Peirce papers in detail and enriches his account with numerous quotations from letters by Peirce and by his friends. This is a fascinating account of a p. (shrink)

Philosopher, theologian, philologist, urban sociologist, literary critic, collector, archivist, essayist, memoirist, children's author, allegorist, media theorist, hashish connoisseur, closet surrealist, theorist of fascism, professional melancholic – it is by now habitual to begin any account of Walter Benjamin's work with an inventory of the grafts and incongruities traversing his tangled maze of writings. First known through his rather fraught association with Gershom Scholem and Theodor Adorno (who were effectively responsible for the posthumous dissemination of his corpus); sometime ally and interlocutor (...) of Brecht, Kracauer, Bloch, and Buber; refugee in the Paris of Bataille and company during the 1930s: Benjamin exerts today a fascination all the more striking for its untimeliness. Adopted as spiritual soulmate and precursor of almost every major trend in contemporary Continental thought – from cultural studies to deconstruction, from psychoanalysis to new historicism, from critical theory à la Frankfurt school to poststructural linguistics, from molecular politics to death‐of‐God theology, from radical geography to phantomology, from film theory to Heideggerean hermeneutics, from Foucaultian micrology to cyberpunk aesthetics – he epitomizes that unclassifiable swirl of intellectual impulses we have come to associate with the peregrinations of Weimar culture. (shrink)

ABSTRACT As a classical philologist, Nietzsche was extremely familiar with the work of many ancient Greek writers. It is well known that Nietzsche made a practice of identifying with and praising ancient thinkers with whom he felt a kinship. It is worth investigating, then, whether Nietzsche's mention of Hippocrates in D signals a sustained interest in the so-called father of medicine. I argue that there is no evidence that Nietzsche paid special attention to Hippocrates or the Hippocratic corpus. Instead, Nietzsche's (...) curious allusion to Hippocrates is likely influenced in part by his reading of the Comtean positivist Émile Littré. Finally, I argue that if Nietzsche is consciously “Hippocratic” at all, he is so in virtue of the “medical posture” he adopts in D, where Nietzsche's remarks suggest his mission is to relieve humankind of the psychological suffering caused by morality. (shrink)

The German philosopher and philologist Friedrich Ast published this monumental lexicon in three volumes. A professor of classical literature at the University of Landshut and member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, Ast wrote widely on the history of philosophy. He edited a complete edition of Plato with Latin translation, identifying spurious interpolations and false attributions, using this as a basis for his Lexicon. The entries give citations both from Plato and from later works that extensively quote Plato. Though the (...) Lexicon met with criticism for omissions of particles, prepositions and proper names, and the lack of systematic arrangement, it had a high reputation throughout the nineteenth century. It remains a milestone in Plato scholarship and is an indispensable resource for readers interested in the history of philology and methods in textual criticism. (shrink)

The German philosopher and philologist Friedrich Ast published this monumental lexicon in three volumes. A professor of classical literature at the University of Landshut and member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, Ast wrote widely on the history of philosophy. He edited a complete edition of Plato with Latin translation, identifying spurious interpolations and false attributions, using this as a basis for his Lexicon. The work is arranged alphabetically, Volume 1 covering Alpha to Epsilon. The entries give citations both from (...) Plato and from later works that extensively quote Plato. Though the Lexicon met with criticism for omissions of particles, prepositions and proper names, and the lack of systematic arrangement, it had a high reputation throughout the nineteenth century. It remains a milestone of Plato scholarship and is an indispensable resource for readers interested in the history of philology and methods in textual criticism. (shrink)

The German philosopher and philologist Friedrich Ast published this monumental lexicon in three volumes. A professor of classical literature at the University of Landshut and member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, Ast wrote widely on the history of philosophy. He edited a complete edition of Plato with Latin translation, identifying spurious interpolations and false attributions, using this as a basis for his Lexicon. The work is arranged alphabetically, Volume 2 covering Theta to Omicron. The entries give citations both from (...) Plato and from later works that extensively quote Plato. Though the Lexicon met with criticism for omissions of particles, prepositions and proper names, and the lack of systematic arrangement, it had a high reputation throughout the nineteenth century. It remains a milestone in Plato scholarship and is an indispensable resource for readers interested in the history of philology and methods in textual criticism. (shrink)

The German philosopher and philologist Friedrich Ast published this monumental lexicon in three volumes. A professor of classical literature at the University of Landshut and member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, Ast wrote widely on the history of philosophy. He edited a complete edition of Plato with Latin translation, identifying spurious interpolations and false attributions, using this as a basis for his Lexicon. The work is arranged alphabetically, Volume 3 covering Pi to Omega. The entries give citations both from (...) Plato and from later works that extensively quote Plato. Though the Lexicon met with criticism for omissions of particles, prepositions and proper names, and the lack of systematic arrangement, it had a high reputation throughout the nineteenth century. It remains a milestone in Plato scholarship and is an indispensable resource for readers interested in the history of philology and methods in textual criticism. (shrink)

German-born Sanskritist and philologist Max Müller was a pioneer in the field of comparative mythology and religion. Settling in England in 1846, during his distinguished career he served as Taylorian professor of modern European languages, curator of the Bodleian Library and Oxford's first professor of comparative philology. The content of this book was originally presented as part of a lecture series delivered at the University of Glasgow in 1893, where Müller was serving as the Gifford Lecturer. Müller's aim in presenting (...) these lectures was to show that the only way of properly understanding religious phenomena was through utilising historical method. The three volumes preceding this one focused on 'physical religion', 'natural religion' and 'anthropological religion'; this fourth book, on theosophy, contains fifteen lectures, the subject matter ranging from Alexandrian Christianity and the eschatology of Plato to the journey of the soul after death. (shrink)

Der 1804 geborene, mit Hegel, Marx und anderen Denkern seiner Zeit auf Kriegsfuß stehende, aber Anschauungen des späten Wittgenstein vorwegnehmende Sprachphilosoph, Philologe, Literarhistoriker und vielseitige Autor Otto Friedrich Gruppe hat seit seiner Wiederentdeckung durch Fritz Mauthner im Verlauf des 20. Jahrhunderts zunehmend Beachtung gefunden. Dies rechtfertigt eine nähere Betrachtung seines reichhaltigen, in mancher Hinsicht in die Zukunft weisenden Oeuvres anläßlich seines 200. Geburtstags. Neben den von Mauthner neu edierten philosophischen Hauptwerken hat Gruppe Gedichtbände, literatur- und kunstkritische Schriften sowie altphilologische Arbeiten (...) hinterlassen, die zum Teil heute lebhaft diskutiert werden. Im vorliegenden Sammelband äußern sich Vertreter verschiedener Fachrichtungen aus verschiedenen Ländern zu Werken Gruppes. (shrink)

Daybreak marks the arrival of Nietzsche's 'mature' philosophy and is indispensable for an understanding of his critique of morality and 'revaluation of all values'. This volume presents the distinguished translation by R. J. Hollingdale, with a new introduction that argues for a dramatic change in Nietzsche's views from Human, All Too Human to Daybreak, and shows how this change, in turn, presages the main themes of Nietzsche's later and better-known works such as On the Genealogy of Morality. The main themes (...) of Daybreak are located in their intellectual and philosophical contexts: in Nietzsche's training as a classical philologist and his fascination with the Sophists and Thucydides; in the moral philosophies of Kant and Schopenhauer, which are the central foci of Nietzsche's critique of morality; and in the German Materialist movement of the 1850s and after, which shaped Nietzsche's conception of persons. The edition is completed by a chronology, notes and a guide to further reading. (shrink)

This study attempts to reconstruct Nietzsche’s reading of Aristotle in the 1860s and 1870s—the years before he left his career as a philologist. Against the popular view that Nietzsche read only one book by Aristotle, namely the Rhetoric, the present study hopes to show that he had direct knowledge of several of Aristotle’s main works, while much of his interest in Aristotle centred on the latter’s account of art. The particular aim of this study is to explore how Nietzsche’s reading (...) of Aristotle contributed to the formation of The Birth of Tragedy. It will show that, although Nietzsche mentions Aristotle in his first book only en passant, his theory of tragedy should be understood against the background of Aristotelian poetics, especially as interpreted by such contemporaries as Jacob Bernays, Joseph Hubert Reinkens, and Gustav Teichmüller. (shrink)

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900) was a German philosopher. His writing included critiques of religion, morality, contemporary culture, philosophy and science, using a distinctive style and displaying a fondness for aphorism. Nietzsche s influence remains substantial within and beyond philosophy, notably in existentialism and postmodernism. He began his career as a philologist before turning to philosophy. At the age of 24 he became Professor of Classical Philology at the University of Basel, but resigned in 1879 due to health problems, which would (...) plague him for most of his life. In 1889 he exhibited symptoms of serious mental illness, living out his remaining years in the care of his mother and sister until his death in 1900. His works include From my Life (1858), On Music (1858), Napoleon III as a President (1862), Free Willand Fate (1862), My Life (1864), The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Richard Wagner in Bayreuth (1876), Human, All-Too-Human (1878), Beyond Good and Evil (1886), The Antichrist (1888) and Ecce Homo (1888). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Nietzsche’s Rhetoric on the Grounds of Philology and HermeneuticsAdrian Del Caro"The philosopher believes the value of his philosophy lies in the whole, in the structure: posterity finds it in the stone with which he built."Human, All Too Human, 1.201"All science only achieved continuity and constancy when the art of correct reading, that is philology, reached its height."Human, All Too Human, 1.270The complexity of Nietzschean rhetoric demands first a basic (...) working definition of rhetoric. In the etymological sense of Greek rhe¯torike¯, the art of oratory, and extrapolated to include the art of communicating effectively through writing, Nietzsche's rhetoric is a highly stylized, deeply self-aware manner of expression designed to convey meaning and to appeal. In the more limited sense of my essay, Nietzschean rhetoric is furthermore a discourse whose communicative and appealing aspects are aimed at the earth for the purpose of grounding human beings. By "rhetoric" I do not mean the negative connotation associated with "insincere or grandiloquent language" (Webster's), though it is certainly the case that Nietzsche's rhetoric frequently takes flight and requires grounding. It is to be expected that a classical philologist by training, and both a teacher and a writer by profession, would have a close understanding and practiced application of rhetoric; the particular challenge in explicating Nietzsche's rhetoric lies in the task to which his rhetoric is put, as well as in the zeal with which he pursued his task. I am not primarily concerned with what Nietzsche had to say about rhetoric while lecturing at the University of Basle, though I agree that Gilman, Blair, and Parent are right to emphasize the importance of rhetoric for the interpretation of Nietzsche's writings and in its own right as a competitor with philosophy (1989, xii, xvi, xx), rather, I am concerned [End Page 101] with the practice of rhetoric that distinguishes Nietzsche's writings from the early 1870s until the so-called Wahnsinnszettel (postcards and letters of madness) written in early January 1889. I also agree with Moore, who analyzes the specifically biological and medical idiom of Nietzsche and concludes "that new light can be thrown on [Nietzsche's] thought by situating it within the historical context of nineteenth-century theories of evolution and degeneration" (Moore 2002, 1-2).1In an early aphorism entitled "Origin of faith" Nietzsche concluded: "Habituation of spiritual principles [Grundsätze] without grounds [Gründe] is called faith."2 I provide the German to demonstrate that whenever possible, Nietzsche drew on the Germanic Grund in his discussions of grounding, even though he was keenly aware of Greek and Latin alternatives and could have used them. So for example Nietzsche's translator (say Holling-dale) could have chosen to use English "grounds" for German Gründe, but chose instead to use "reasons," which is also correct though not exactly in the spirit of Nietzsche's etymological nuance.3 Grundsätze, literally "grounding propositions," given idiomatically as "principles," has no comparable etymology in English. What one becomes accustomed to or adopts as a habit based on faith versus grounds, cannot by definition be grounded, whether or not it is a principle. Based on this example, living with grounds or reasons is living with foundation, with base and support. Living without grounds is simply acquiring habits, living by faith, living groundlessly. A similar usage is involved in English "grounds for dismissal," whereby "grounds" equals "reasons." Even the words founded and unfounded preserve some of the strength of "grounded" and "ungrounded" as I use them. In German "unfounded" is unbegründet or grundlos, participle and adjective respectively, and Nietzsche availed himself whenever possible of German expressions based on ground.The aphorism immediately following "Origin of faith" relies even more on Grund, and its translation into English deserves close attention. "Aus den Folgen auf Grund und Ungrund zurückgeschlossen" becomes "Reasons judged a posteriori on the basis of consequences,"4 which I would render as "grounds and ungrounds retroactively concluded from consequences." Nietzsche uses Grund twice already in the title, and in the body of this "aphorism" of thirty lines a variation of Grund occurs six more times (Gründe, Gr... (shrink)

This polemical work presents to the English-speaking world one of the most original philosophical thinkers to have emerged within post-war Europe. Sebastiano Timpanaro is an Italian classical philologist by training, an author of scholarly studies on the nineteenth-century poet Leopardi, and a Marxist by conviction. With great force and wit, On Materialism sets itself against what it sees as the virtually universal tendency within western Marxism since the war, to dissociate historical materialism from biological or physical materialism. Whereas the philosophical (...) legacy of the later Engels has been decried by most prominent Marxists since the 1920s, Timpanaro eloquently defends its essential purpose and relevance, by unfashionably re-emphasising the permanent weight of nature within history. In doing so, he returns to the heritage of Lucretius and Leopardi, and argues for a more consistent materialism that is at once more pessimistic and more hedonistic than any other contemporary version of Marxism. Timpanaro emphasises the insuperable limits of frailty and mortality as unalterable conditions of society whose transformation is the goal of revolutionary socialism. Timpanaro vigorously attacks what he regards as the widespread entente between a diluted Marxism and a fashionable idealism in the west, whether in the form of an “existentialist” or a “structuralist” union of the two. The aversion of the former to the work of Darwin and Engels receives a spirited refutation, no less than the indulgence of the latter towards the work of Saussure or Levi-Strauss. A special introduction written for this English edition deals with the phenomenon of the recent revival of “vulgar materialism” in the Anglo-Saxon world, in the fields of psychology and anthropology, and its relationship to racism. On Materialism will be one of the central focuses of cultural and intellectual controversy within and beyond Marxism in the next decade. (shrink)

In recent years, Nietzsche’s views on (natural) science attracted a considerable amount of scholarly attention. Overall, his attitude towards science tends to be one of suspicion, or ambivalence at least. My article addresses the “Nietzsche and science” theme from a slightly different perspective, raising a somewhat different type of question, more pragmatic if you like, namely: how to be a Nietzschean philosopher of science today? What would the methodological contours of a Nietzschean approach to present-day research areas (such as neuroscience, (...) astrophysics, synthetic biology or climate studies) amount to? In other words, my paper reflects a shift of focus from author studies to extrapolation. The design of my article is as follows. I will start with the question (already widely discussed in the expert literature) to what extent Friedrich Nietzsche (a classical philologist by training) managed to familiarise himself with the natural sciences of his epoch. Subsequently, I will outline some basic methodological and conceptual ingredients of Nietzsche’s philosophy of science, focussing on core issues such as “genealogy”, “interpretation”, “enhancement” and “truth”. Next, I will elucidate Nietzsche’s genealogical methodology with the help of three case studies (three representative samples if you will) taken from Nietzsche’s writings and dealing with physiology, astronomy and neuro-psychology respectively. Finally, I will present the methodological contours of a Nietzschean understanding of contemporary technoscience. (shrink)

The Cambridge Companion to Socrates is a collection of essays providing a comprehensive guide to Socrates, the most famous Greek philosopher. Because Socrates himself wrote nothing, our evidence comes from the writings of his friends (above all Plato), his enemies, and later writers. Socrates is thus a literary figure as well as a historical person. Both aspects of Socrates' legacy are covered in this volume. Socrates' character is full of paradox, and so are his philosophical views. These paradoxes have led (...) to deep differences in scholar's interpretation of Socrates and his thought. Mirroring this wide range of thought about Socrates, this volume's contributors are unusually diverse in their background and perspective. The essays in this volume were authored by classical philologists, philosophers, and historians from Germany, Francophone Canada, Britain, and the United States, and they represent a range of interpretive and philosophical traditions. (shrink)

In contrast to the traditional and ordinary interpretation of Xunzi’s theory of human nature, which considers Xunzi’s theory as claiming that human nature is bad or evil, this article aims at, first, arguing that the interpretation is wrong or at least incomplete and, second, constructing a new interpretation that, according to Xunzi’s text, there are some factors in human nature that are able to promote good behaviors. I shall demonstrate that some major paragraphs in Xunzi’s text were misinterpreted and misarranged, (...) analyze that the word wei in the chapter of “Zhengming” has two different but related senses, one of which designates some of the potential capacities of human nature, and argue that the 23 words in the chapter of “Rongru” should not be deleted as redundant, as was done by the two famous philologists in Qing dynasdy, Wang Niansun and Wang Xianqian. (shrink)

In this paper I will argue not only that there is nothing new in the term “New Philology” , but that the old philology was in fact a new philology with respect to that which had preceded. Use of the labels “new” and “old,” applied to the dialectical development of a discipline, is a gesture sufficiently charged ideologically as to have little meaning in the absolute terms — before and after, bad and good — that it affixes. On the contrary, (...) to the extent that calling oneself “new” is a value-laden gesture which implies that something else is “old” and therefore less worthy, it constitutes a rhetorical strategy of autolegitimation — with little recognition, of course, that the process itself of declaring oneself “new” is indeed very old, or at least as old, where the present case is concerned, as Vico's Nuova Scienza, which some see as the beginning of philological science. The qualifier “new” is by definition a relational term. Vico conceived of his science as new with respect to the philosophy of Descartes; Meyer-Lübke and the Neo-Grammarians, with respect to the Romantics; the Italian New Philologists, with respect primarily to the textual methodology of Joseph Bédier. (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)