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Research at the Institute of Classical Languages and Literatures

Reasoning and explaining in ancient thought

Conference proceedings edited by Sabine Föllinger published

Ancient philosophy developed different forms of justification and explanation that were influential in the history of science. This volume, edited by Sabine Föllinger in collaboration with Benedikt Löhlein, explores these approaches. It brings together the contributions to the 7th Congress of the Society for Ancient Philosophy (GANPH), which took place in Marburg from October 4 to 7, 2022. They cover the entire period of Greco-Roman antiquity, from the pre-Socratics to Christian late antiquity. The question of the relationship between the explanatory approaches of philosophy and other approaches, such as those developed by epic, tragedy, historiography, myth and religion, is also examined. In this way, the volume offers a wide range of interpretations of different texts.
The key questions are: How do argumentations proceed in philosophical and scientific texts of antiquity? What other forms of explanation existed, for example in epic and historiography? Where and why do philosophical and scientific authors integrate forms of non-scientific explanations? What forms of scientific theory exist and what patterns of explanation do they offer?
The range of topics is rounded off by an outlook on the explanatory potential of narrative models from the perspective of modernity.

The virtuoso perfidy

“The face like the expression: death, jaundice, poison!” - “You are a lecher, a glutton, a gambler!” - In ancient times, these were still very moderate insults. Even a virtuoso of the polished word like Cicero wielded the heavy sabre of verbal argument at least as readily as the elegant foil. In this volume, Rome's best masters offer an entertaining education in the art of insults using numerous examples and their stories.

The fact that Cicero of all people complained one day that he lived in a city as vituperative as Rome (in tam maledica civitate) is not without comedy. After all, the undisputed master of ancient rhetoric was also a grand master of insults. One day, for example, he addressed a political opponent with the words: “You black nothing, you piece of excrement, you stain” - and that was just the beginning of the unkindnesses he had in store for him. Whether they were politicians, poets or philosophers, they all knew how to dish it out when someone got in their way. However, Dennis Pausch has not only created a “best of” ancient insults, but also tells the accompanying stories of when and why the verbal club once circled. The result is an informative, entertaining and inspiring read for fans of cultivated (and less cultivated) insults.

Saving the Kashmirian Sanskrit Heritage

The importance of Kashmirian Sanskrit Literature was realised by scholars only in the late 19th century, when the literary canon and historiography of Sanskrit Literature in the Indian subcontinent had already taken shape. Texts and whole genres that were unique to Kashmir, as political history, were not properly recognised and led to a distorted view of South Asian literature. Much has changed, especially in the last decades, but the latest exodus and dissipation of the Kashmirian Hindu community is bound to have a lasting negative effect on such studies. A major effort to rescue the still unpublished and often unknown highlights of Kashmirian Sanskrit literature from oblivion is warranted. 

In the present project a team specialising in editing Kashmirian texts will make a larger number of carefully selected texts accessible in first editions by utilizing the vast reservoir of Kashmirian manuscripts in India and Europe, but also scans that appeared online in recent years. Previous work on unknown texts from newly opened up archives has suggested that much more is to be discovered. One spectacular example would be a 17th century piece of visual poetry from Kashmir, the "Wish-fulfilling Tree" (kalpavṛkṣa), which is breaking several international records (for instance, for using thirty languages in its intexts), but has remained completely unknown until very recently. The project will produce a careful selection of previously unknown Kashmirian Sanskrit works in ten volumes. They will be accompanied by studies of their literary, religious or philosophical aspects, from which their significance for the history of Sanskrit Literature can be grasped. The project is a bold attempt to drastically improve the basis of scholarship in Kashmirian Sanskrit, and we shall argue that as a result new genres in Sanskrit literature need to be defined. 

The project homepage can be found at https://www.kasaharaksa.de 

Aristotle’s Generation of Animals. A Comprehensive Approach

Aristotle’s work "On Generation of Animals" is fascinating. By integrating empirical facts into contexts of justification and by explaining reproduction in the framework of his general theory Aristotle wrote a biological ‘masterpiece’. At the same time it raises many issues because due to the difficulty of the subject under investigation (for example, the egg-cell had not yet been discovered) the theory is complex and often speculative.

The contributions in this volume resulting from a conference held in Marburg in 2018 study the challenging writing from various perspectives. They examine the structure of the work, the method and the manner of writing, its relation to other writings, and its scientific context. By investigating the underlying philosophical concepts and their relation to the empirical research offered in "On Generation of Animals" the contributions also try to solve puzzles which Aristotle’s explanation of the role of male and female offers as well as his idea of embryogenesis. An outlook for the history of reception rounds off the volume. 

Aristotle as a scientific author

How does Aristotle work as a scientific author? How does he use writing for his argumentation and its presentation? This monograph systematically examines this question for the work De generatione animalium. In it, Aristotle develops a complex theory with which he seeks to explain reproductive and hereditary phenomena in the entire animal world, including humans. Aristotle's argumentation is dense and alternates between reasoning, discursiveness and presentation. An overall procedural approach within the framework of macro-planning does not exclude the rhetorical design of individual passages. Overall, it can be shown how Aristotle uses writing to develop his own theory in an innovative way ('epistemic writing') and at the same time to communicate the path of his research.

With the detailed analysis of Books I-IV, the systematic evaluation of the results and a catalog of significant formulations, the book offers a starting point and a set of tools for further detailed research into Aristotle's writings and at the same time a contribution to the history of scientific literature. 

Glossing the Psalms

THE EMERGENCE OF THE WRITTEN VERNACULARS IN WESTERN EUROPE FROM THE SEVENTH TO THE TWELFTH CENTURIES

Glosses and marginalia form one of the earliest witnesses of European vernacular languages: But how were they used alongside Latin as the standard written language? How were texts in different languages read at the same time, and why? The comparative study of glossed manuscripts offers the opportunity to analyze the language choices of scribes in different parts of Europe. It is also important to understand how glosses were used in different languages alongside other characters such as punctuation and construe marks, and how they are integrated into the page layout. Only recently has scholarship begun to consider the broader cultural context of these glossed manuscripts and to view glosses and marginalia as important witnesses to the history of reading and the medieval transfer of knowledge in Western Europe from Late Antiquity to the High Middle Ages.
Prof. Blom's comparative approach combines historical sociolinguistics with palaeography, text philology, comparative linguistics and cultural history. In this way, he attempts to locate early writing in the Celtic and Germanic languages within a wider European horizon, especially where it interacts with Latin in the form of glosses and marginalia and takes the form of “multilingual reading”.

“The corpus of Hittite festival rituals: state administration of the cult system in Late Bronze Age Anatolia”

Long-term academy project at the Academy of Sciences and Literature | Mainz

In the Hittite Empire, which was one of the most important great powers of the Bronze Age Anatolia in the 2nd millennium BC, the religious state cult was an important concern of the ruling elite. Around a third of the approximately 34,000 texts and text fragments that have survived from the re-excavated archives of the capital Ḫattuša can be assigned to the ceremonial ritual texts. These thus form the largest group of Hittite texts. They record the cultic worship of the Hittite gods, which was primarily the responsibility of the Hittite royal couple and other members of the royal family. According to the understanding of the time, it was the basis for the well-being of the state: if the gods were adequately respected and provided with sacrifices, they in turn ensured the protection and well-being of the royal family and the country as a whole.

The long-term project of the Academy in Mainz (2016-2036) already produced a complete edition of the Hittite festival ritual texts and carries out comprehensive thematic studies. It is based at three research centers, the Academy in Mainz, the University of Marburg and the University of Würzburg, each with a different focus. The Field of Indo-European Linguistics in Marburg focuses on the linguistic analysis of the texts. Questions concern, for example, the formulaic nature of the language, technical language features and other pragmalinguistic and syntactic aspects.

Due to the considerable amount of material and a certain uniformity, which is reflected in very similar descriptions of sacrificial events, it is often impossible to assign a fragment to a particular feast with certainty. For this reason, the corpus was first digitally recorded in its entirety. It is now being provided with metadata so that computer-aided methods and complex searches can be used to join tablet fragments, group and reconstruct the texts. Hittite palaeography will be raised to a new level using innovative digital methods and also made usable for text reconstruction.

For the large and important festival rituals, including the KI.LAM festival, the nuntarriyašḫa festival and the AN.DAḪ.ŠUM festival as well as the festivals of the local cults in the cities of Arinna, Nerik and Zippalanda, web-based open access publications are to be produced as part of the “Hittitology Portal Mainz” (www.hethiter.net), which will always be kept up to date with the latest research and can be accessed as print-on-demand editions. In addition, anthologies of further selected festival descriptions for interdisciplinary research will be presented in print as reading texts, as well as overarching thematic studies on the history of religion and administration, palaeography and the language of the texts.

For more detailed information, see http://www.adwmainz.de/projekte/corpus-der-hethitischen-festrituale/informationen.html.

A modern look at Plato

Did Plato, the 'grandfather' of philosophy, also have an understanding of economic relationships? This has often been denied. However, a close reading of his dialogues 'Politeia' and especially 'Nomoi' show that Plato starts from the observation of economic processes and draws conclusions from them within the framework of his anthropology and political philosophy. The book, which is the result of a project carried out jointly with the Marburg VLW (link to this), explores these conclusions: as humans are not self-sufficient, they are dependent on exchange. Exchange processes can also be used to achieve greater efficiency. However, given the human tendency to always want more, the economic sphere poses a risk - but not only for the moral behavior of the individual. Rather, the unequal distribution of goods creates a 'social gap' and thus tensions that endanger the stability of the state and society. Moreover, the intertwining of business and politics means that those with political responsibility do not act in the interests of the common good.  The economic sector must therefore be subject to regulations and must not be allowed to influence political decisions.

Satire in the Roman Republic

What satire is permitted and where satirical freedom reaches its limits cannot be answered in an abstract and universally valid way. Disputes up to recent times show how differently the boundaries are drawn depending on cultural traditions and the legal systems based on them. In modern European countries, two competing fundamental rights are generally assumed: the freedom of speech of the individual and the right to protection of institutions, persons or beliefs.

Roman satire is considered to be the archetype of the genre, but it raises a number of problems, some of which have long been the subject of controversial debate and have not been satisfactorily resolved. On the one hand, this concerns the question of whether satire is actually a Roman invention or not: one hypothesis led to the search for pre-literary origins in Rome, the other to an attempt to identify satirical elements in Greek literature, as a result of which a theory of satire emerged as a kind of by-product. In addition, the satirical is by no means identical with the genre of 'satire', which in fact contains a wealth of non-satirical elements. The aporias have not been resolved. Nevertheless, a literary-historical scheme has been established which has remained largely unchanged since Casaubonus (1605) up to the most recent introductions to Roman satire and which, after a chapter on pre-literary 'preliminary stages', places one representative of Roman satire next to another and deals with each in a separate chapter. But this is not really satisfactory.

The project therefore takes a different approach. It concentrates on the Roman Republic and also includes the history of science side of the question, particularly in the early modern period.