On the Relation of Disciplinary Development and Historical Self-Presentation — the Case of Classical Philology Since the end of the Eighteenth Century

Abstract

It is no accident that one of the very oldest disciplines in the humanities is represented in institutes that have such disparate designations as ‘Institute for Classical Philology’, ‘for Humaniora’, “de langues et de Littératures Grecques et Latines”, ‘für Altertumswissenschaft’ (which corresponds to the departments for Ancient Literature and History) and for ‘Literary Science’. It is clear to a philologist that this state merely reflects simultaneously all phases of the history of the discipline since the eighteenth century and there is no lack of investigations in philology on its own history tracing this development. What has not yet been investigated is the question of a possible interdependence between the history of the discipline — especially cultivated in philology — and the development of the discipline itself.

“Classical education — useful education for uselessness becomes useless itself. Where tradition rationalizes itself, it has already ceased.” M. Horkheimer (1950)