Using the motif of the hipster to consider the arrival of the concept “Anthropocene” into the orbit of critical theory, this essay establishes the grave existential consequences that issue from the infatuation with, and rapid, uncritical uptake and circulation of, concepts in a philosophical market overcome by neoliberal pressures. These epistemic habits align with political commitments that unwittingly controvert the original intents of critique—and this paradox requires remediation. This essay, thus, argues for a recalibration of epistemic praxis by reclaiming a (...) retro, critical, vital form of philology—figured as both a scholarly practice and a way of life. The hope is to counter the stultifying force of the late-capitalist praxis of commodification, consumption, and hyper-production of concepts spawned by the fatal lure of progress narratives and the fetishization of innovation and originality they entail. Accordingly, we might resolve the tension between habits and politics and account for vital differences and resistances not revealed by the mutation of critique inherent in contemporary strategies. Thus, not only might epistemic politics evolve, but critical theory may also avert extinction by revitalizing it as a dynamic life practice. (shrink)

Focusing on the works of Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and particularly Werner Hamacher, this essay seeks to develop an understanding of “survival” as the medial condition of linguistic structures. In the course of the past century and beyond, the term “survival” has repeatedly been deployed in discussions around the ontological status of linguistic entities. Most prominently, Benjamin finds in “survival” the essence of what he calls “translatability.” He decidedly puts the term in quotations marks to signal its linguistic nature, (...) which prompts Hamacher to speak of “survival in citation.” This article thus attempts to demonstrate that the term “survival” is not reducible to its biological or phenomenal implications, and reintroduces it as the fundamental concept of a renewed understanding of philology. In three sections, the essay discusses linguistic technification, translation, and irony as three modes that bring the survival of language to the fore. (shrink)

Joining the university context in the middle of the 19th century, Philology served as a comprehensive basis for what nowadays is meant by literary and linguistic studies. Depending on the specialization tendency that would settle down in the academic context, each of these areas followed separate or even divergent paths, losing, to a great extent, the contact with its initial basis. Despite this state of affairs, Philology has displayed a strong capacity of resistance, maintaining its traditional dimension active (...) or going through metamorphoses that resulted from the incorporation of new technologies, as well as from the epistemological adjustment that enabled it to overcome its first positivist stages. Trying to find a new place inside the general framework of Social Sciences and Humanities, literary studies need to recover its order and credibility, two factors that the new face of Philology can inspire. The present study aims at reconstructing the most recent trajectory undergone by this field of research and education, by identifying a space of reconnection that already seems to be adequate and beneficial. (shrink)

A prehistory of today's humanities, from ancient Greece to the early twentieth century Many today do not recognize the word, but "philology" was for centuries nearly synonymous with humanistic intellectual life, encompassing not only the study of Greek and Roman literature and the Bible but also all other studies of language and literature, as well as history, culture, art, and more. In short, philology was the queen of the human sciences. How did it become little more than an (...) archaic word? In Philology, the first history of Western humanistic learning as a connected whole ever published in English, James Turner tells the fascinating, forgotten story of how the study of languages and texts led to the modern humanities and the modern university. The humanities today face a crisis of relevance, if not of meaning and purpose. Understanding their common origins—and what they still share—has never been more urgent. (shrink)

This book explains the general intellectual climate of the early Ch'ing period, and the political and cultural characteristics of the Ch'ing regime at the time. Professor Huang brings to life the book's central characters, Li Fu and the three great emperors - K'ang-hsi, Yung-cheng, and Chien-lung - whom he served. Although the author's main concern is to explain the contributions of Li Fu to the Lu-Wang school of Confucianism, he also gives a clearly written account of the Lu-Wang and Ch'eng-Chu (...) schools from the twelfth century to the eighteenth. In a clear, succinct style, Huang explains the historical differences between the Ch'eng-Chu and Lu-Wang schools without sacrificing the subtleties of either. The book culminates in a discussion of the hero-emperor K'ang-hsi's appropriation of the 'Tradition of the Way' from his intellectual officials, which denied them their traditional role as moral censors and critics of the emperor's exercise of authority. (shrink)

Various scholars have argued that the rise of modern information technology over the past century has coincided with a steady decline of traditional methods of learning and interpretation, and has contributed to the general sense of “worldlessness” or anomie. In the words of Paul Ricoeur, “we are overwhelmed by a flood of words, by polemics, by the assault of the virtual, which today create a kind of opaque zone.” Philology, the ancient discipline that grew in the past two centuries (...) to encompass literary study, linguistics, and intellectual history, was originally conceived as a return to the past with the aim of retrieving the knowledge of bygone times. While the recent revival of interest in philology recognizes its importance to the humanities, it remains unnamed as such. The aim of my exploration of the history and practices of philology is to suggest how it can reinstate the presence of the past. With its attentiveness to language—undertaken in the silent spaces of private study, archive, and library—philology not only confirms the presence of the dead but also enacts a more fundamental return to “world.”. (shrink)

Philology haunts the humanities, through both its defendants and its detractors. This article examines the construction of philology as the premier science of the long nineteenth century in Europe. It aims to bring the history of philology up to date by taking it seriously as a science and giving it the kind of treatment that has dominated the history of science for the last generation: to reveal how practices, instruments, and cooperation create visions of timeless knowledge. This (...) historical inquiry therefore asks how one modality of textual interpretation could morph into an integrated system of knowledge production, which ostensibly explained the whole human world. Ultimately, it advances a central argument: philology operated as a relational network, one that concealed diversity and disunity, projected unity and stability, and seemed to rise above the material conditions of its own making. The article scrutinizes the composition of philology as a heterogeneous ensemble, the functioning of philology comparable to other sciences, whether human or natural, and the historical contingency in the articulation of philology. (shrink)

This paper presents an original use of Twitter to interpret and rewrite the poems of Francesco Petrarca's Rerum vulgarium fragmenta implemented within the Oregon Petrarch Open Book OPOB). This activity was partially inspired by the idea of Twitterature developed by Alexander Aciman and Emmett Rensin; we believe with them that our digital time should develop new and more functional ways of addressing literary texts but at the same time we are convinced that the "burdensome duty of hours spent reading" cannot (...) be eliminated. On the contrary, the new ways of reading in the digital era as we envisage them are the result and consequence of broader and deeper reading activities. We conceived the project of writing 366 tweets, out of the 366 poems that make the last form of Petrarca’s Rvf, as the result of different philological activities, from reading the texts in the original language to consulting manuscripts, translations and intersemiotic renderings of the texts. Before writing the 140 characters that make one tweet we also elaborated paraphrases, summaries and keywords related to the individual poems. Students created the first version of the tweets during the 2011 UO seminar on Re-reading Petrarca’s Rvf in the Digtal Era. The second version was elaborated in the context of a seminar on the same topic during Winter 2014. This paper presents the two versions of the Twitter Edition of Petrarca's Rvf now available in the OPOB and focuses on the philology connected to the latest edition that provided an English translation of the original tweets written in Italian. The actual Italian and English 366 tweets are published in the Appendix to the article. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 122.2 (2001) 255-263 [Access article in PDF] Philology And Cuisine In De Re Coquinaria John Edwards The text of Apicius' De Re Coquinaria contains many disputed readings. Through bisociation, the use of one discipline to illuminate another, some of them can be resolved. To put it simply, the translation should fit the plate. Just as Homer, the poet of the Achaians, wrote a (...) description of a Troy whose existence was proven by close textual readings and subsequent field work by Schliemann, so Apicius, the Roman artist of cuisine, left recipes whose language can be emended and whose tastes can be verified through practical experiment in the modern kitchen.The limits of a strictly philological approach to Apicius became apparent when, during my composition of The Roman Cookery of Apicius, the translation of a number of recipe titles was inconsistent with the technical information which followed. This was extraordinary because of Apicius' imperative, laconic style, whose formulae more resemble the ritualistic epithets of the annals of the Hittite kings than the informed, conversational prose of an Elizabeth David or an M. F. K. Fisher. In his text there is little question of subjectivity in the nomenclature, or puns or literary allusions to test the reader. Indeed, in all ten books of the Coquinaria and in the later and derivative Excerpts of Vinidarius only twice does Apicius emerge from anonymity, at 4.2.12 ("ad mensam nemo agnoscet quid manducet"), and at 1.9.1 (miraberis); and, in any case, I think these uncharacteristic asides are really the happy observations of a copyist. The third atypical remark which puzzles is a reference to a lost and presumably illustrated version of his book. The reference is tantalizing and colloquial, the words perhaps of an editor: "patellam aeneam qualem debes habere infra ostenditur" (4.2.14).The Coquinaria is not written in the colloquial Latin of Petronius' Satyricon, with which it is probably contemporary. His text is spare to the point of postmodern bleakness; there is nothing, except some of the actual ingredients, of the decadence of the Cena Trimalchionis. It is a collection of lists and brief instructions, often formulaic, never personal. It follows, then, that what remains is the essential manual, stripped of nuance and personality through centuries of use and transmission, rather [End Page 255] like the spare lists of foodstuffs written by Anthimus in his De Observatione Ciborum or in Gargilius' De Hortis. The words must literally convey their meanings to the careful cook. The temptation to be swayed by a perhaps unusual or delicious adjective must be resisted. Although his text refers obliquely to his predecessors (the authors of lost Sicilian, Greek, and Egyptian monographs) and in spite of the fact that the sea routes which supplied Italian markets with oriental spices in the first century reached as far as southern China and the Banda Sea, the ascription of an historically interesting definition should be resisted unless the culinary facts are convincing.An illustration of a probably misunderstood recipe title occurs at 5.3.3, Pisum Indicum, in the Milham text (1969). The variant readings are pisum indicam in the Codex Vaticanus and indicum pisum in the New York Academy of Medicine Codex.These phrases take the accusative because the verb coques is assumed, while the gender is arbitrary throughout the section of recipes for peas in book 5, Ospreon. At 5.3.5, for instance, one reads Pisam Vitellianam sive fabam and later at 5.3.8, Pisam adulteram versatilem. These cases are consistent; but in the phrase pisum indicam the gender is confused, and in the phrase indicum pisum the syntax is irregular, since all of the other eight recipes for peas begin with Pisum, Pisam, Aliter pisa, or Aliter pisam. These variations are caused by the mixing of classical and late Latin forms in a text much altered by the long history of its transcription. Another example of unusual, that is English, syntax occurs with Frontinianum porcellum (8.7.10), "Frontinian pork."If one rejects the Vatican and the New York codex readings, the ambiguous... (shrink)

In the Early Modern era of encyclopedias, the Bible functioned as a tool for managing and organizing the superabundance of information. From Johann Alsted to Johann Scheuchzer, this paper traces the use of the Biblical encyclopedia and the ways that the Bible was deployed to control the data that flooded the world of Early Modern scholarship. In a variety of contexts, the Bible served as a structure for generating meaningful statements from informational noise. In turn, the use of the Bible (...) as a principle of organization would have profound implications for the status of the Bible in Early Modern scholarly culture. (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)

Nineteenth-century German classical philology underpins many structures of the modern humanities. In this book, Constanze Güthenke shows how a language of love and a longing for closeness with a personified antiquity have lastingly shaped modern professional reading habits, notions of biography, and the self-image of scholars and teachers. She argues that a discourse of love was instrumental in expressing the challenges of specialisation and individual formation (Bildung), and in particular for the key importance of a Platonic scene of learning (...) and instruction for imagining the modern scholar. The book is based on detailed readings of programmatic texts from, among others, Wolf, Schleiermacher, Boeckh, Thiersch, Dilthey, Wilamowitz and Nietzsche. It makes a case for revising established narratives, but also for finding new value in imagining distance and an absence of nostalgic longing for antiquity. (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)

Drawing on Nietzsche's prolific early notebooks and correspondence, this book challenges the polarized picture of Nietzsche as a philosopher who abandoned classical philology.

Literary hermeneutics studies the problem of interpreting the meanings of an artistic text, considers it at the intersection of a number of philological fields and thus creates new criteria for philological/critical approach to an artistic text. The necessity that gave rise to literary hermeneutics as a field of philology was to reveal the depth of meanings of the artistic text. It also explains the aesthetic convergence and divergence between classical and modern literary texts, noting the points of intersection of (...) both. The modern artistic text does not arise on dry land, although it originates from the soul of the artist composing it, it is linked to tradition, it reflects a shared spiritual communion by visiting the past, specifically its past. It is clear that every poet who has traveled a certain creative path has his own definition of poetry. In forming this definition (the concept of poetry-!), the poet acts from his own experience and writes more with the intention handed down by tradition. Your own emotion can merge with, modify, or negate the thought of hundreds of years in an artistic text, and as a result, the layer of meaning in artistic texts expands to encompass the whole world. (shrink)

A discussion of Nietzsche's philology as the prelude to his philosophy of science.

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)

This chapter presents ‘Spinoza philology’ the application of a specific approach to the texts written by Spinoza. In philosophy most philological efforts have traditionally been spent on the texts of ancient authors. The chapter offers a brief chronological survey of Spinoza's works, explaining the particular aspects of the way they have been transmitted. Spinoza wrote the kind of Latin that had been the standard for scholarly and academic purposes throughout Europe since the Renaissance. The Amsterdam publisher Jan Rieuwertsz brought (...) out all Spinoza's books: DPP and CM in 1663, TTP in 1670 and Opera Posthuma in 1677. The initial transmission of Spinoza's works was taken care of by a small group of dedicated friends, who copy‐edited his texts, had them translated, printed, and distributed. The results of the editorial activities of the circle around Spinoza were sufficient to meet the demand for his works for 125 years. (shrink)

For over a century, the increasing separation between philosophical hermeneutics, which has moved away from texts, and philology, tempted by positivism, may have caused regret. Formal and cognitive linguistics have developed partial models, thus abandoning the historical comparative methodology characteristic of cultural studies to such an extent that they have lost contact with philological and hermeneutical issues. In contrast, corpus linguistics has developed a digital philology, and is confronted with the hermeneutics of software output. But a text model (...) must still be developed that reflects not only textual semiosis (as a normed pairing between content and expression) but also the poles of Viewpoint (genetic and hermeneutic) and Guarantee (as much for content, in terms of legitimacy, as for expression, in terms of authenticity). This will allow the articulation of internal and external linguistics (as pragmatics cannot), and also the reconciliation of philology and hermeneutics, mediated by text semiotics. As the document is a philological concept, the text a linguistic concept, and the complete work the object of hermeneutics, textual semiosis is the ideal way to understand and describe the articulation between these levels of objectivity and the disciplines attached to them. (shrink)

This essay examines how Indo-Pacific indigenous plant names went from being viewed as instruments of botanical fieldwork, to being seen primarily as currency in anthropological studies. I trace this attitude to Alexander von Humboldt, who differentiated between indigenous phytonyms with merely local relevance to be used as philological data, and universally applicable Latin plant names. This way of using indigenous plant names underwrote a chauvinistic reading of cultural difference, and was therefore especially attractive to commentators lacking acquaintance with any indigenous (...) language or culture. When New Zealand anthropologists embraced this role for Māori phytonyms in the 1890s, however, they did so possessed of a relatively in-depth understanding of Māori culture and the Māori language. This discussion has three primary aims: to illuminate nineteenth-century scholarly engagements with Indo-Pacific plant classifications, in contrast to a prevailing historiographical emphasis on European disregard for this subject; to analyse how indigenous phytonyms acted as ‘boundary objects’ interfacing between cultures and disciplines; and to illustrate the politics of scientific disciplinarity in a colonial context. (shrink)

Die Übertreibungen bei der Textinterpretation der letzten Jahrzehnte haben die literarische Hermeneutik, ja die Philologie überhaupt in Misskredit gebracht und die Fokussierung auf andere Dimensionen der Literatur als den Sinn befördert. Dabei bleibt die Frage, ob eine strengere Praxis der Interpretation nicht immerhin den Kern der »Literaturwissenschaft« sowohl als der »Geistesgeschichte« ausmacht. Dies wollen wir prüfen anhand der Rekonstruktion der kritischen Philologie, die Christoph König in Anspruch nimmt.

This paper is a critical review of Jonardan Ganeri’s Philosophy in Classical India.

A somewhat problematic book has recently been devoted to one of the most fascinating works of Kashmirian Śaiva Advaita: the Śivadṛṣṭi by Somānanda. This furnishes the occasion for broader reflection on the role of philology in dealing with the complex texts of the Pratyabhijñā tradition.

Among Digitized Manuscripts: Philology, Codicology, Paleography in a Digital World. By L. W. C. van Lit. Handbook of Oriental Studies, I, vol. 137. Leiden: Brill, 2020. Pp. xi + 333. $150, €125, open access: https://brill.com/view/title/56196.

A aliança entre a Filologia e a História do Livro é indiscutível, do ponto de vista metodológico, e valiosíssima para a compreensão mesológica de qualquer edição, sendo certo que nenhum livro se publica sem estar inscrito numa dada moldura ecológica da cultura. Por isso mesmo, ultrapassando os limites próprios da actividade bibliográfica, o historiador do livro não pode prescindir da leitura dos textos que se escondem sob a opacidade do objecto livro.

The article discusses 15th-century humanist Giovanni Pontano. Particular focus is given to his philosophical views on the origin of language, its impact on everyday life, and grammar. According to the author, Pontano brought forward ideas on the social uses of language which scholars have usually attributed to the later Enlightenment period. It is suggested that Renaissance humanism may be more important to philosophical history than previously thought. Details related to Pontano's views on semantic precision and the affective, active, and social (...) roles of language are also presented. (shrink)

Oedipus’s basic error was to have viewed evil as a problem, whereas he learns to his grief that it is actually a mystery, an irresolvable paradox, a natural contradiction between the mutually exclusive possibilities of self-determination and predetermination, between freedom of the will and divine omniscience. This is the quandary as it is perceived by philosophy and religion. In the domains of religion and theology Fate is indeed a mystery. Ill-equipped as I am to elucidate mysteries, I will move the (...) discussion to a firmer ground, where the concept of Fate is merely a problem, where scholars, those who “traffic in words,” as Goethe calls us, stand a fighting chance.1My major concerns will be: 1) to determine what .. (shrink)

The possibility of historical knowledge is a problem that occupied Nietzsche’s thought from beginning to end. Because the meanings of values, customs, and even truth itself are historically contingent phenomena, neither timeless nor unchanging, Nietzsche’s most fundamental statements about the character of the world and our place in it are typically framed within a historical account. Several scholars have recently suggested that his means of expositing history are consistent throughout his career. 1 From his early philological articles to his genealogical (...) method, Nietzsche is said to offer a consistent and sustained way of uncovering and evaluating the past. The studies of James I. Porter and Christian Benne are .. (shrink)

There can be no doubt about the object which Delphis was in the habit of leaving at Simaetha's house. The word λπη is capable of meaning a ladle or jug for wine , and the name is conventionally applied by archaeologists to a particular form of jug, but Delphis did not carry a jug about with him. What he took to the gymnasium or palaestra where he appears to have spent most of his time was the portable flask of oil, (...) carried indeed by others, but, together with sponge and scraper, the regular equipment of the athlete. ὌΟλπις, which appears to be a mere synonym, also has the same two meanings. At Sapph. fr. 51 it is a wine-jug, but at T. 18. 45, where the Spartan girls will make libation of oil at Helen's plane-tree, the silver λπις containing it is no doubt that from which they anoint themselves in their masculine way by the Eurotas. (shrink)