Anne Eusterschulte, Glenn Most
Challenging Philologies. Textual Practices in Transcultural Perspective
The last years have witnessed an astonishing philological turn. Philology used to be a term of abuse, employed in order to insinuate a narrow-minded, antiquarian, dusty obsession with outdated texts and abstruse questions that had nothing to do with the real world we live in. But recently people have come to recognize that philology is not only the most fundamental but also the most exciting of all sciences, the foundation for all the humanities and social and natural sciences and a treasure-chest of ideas and methods that can enormously enrich our understanding of the past and present worlds—so long as they are studied comparatively and interdisciplinarily and in terms of the history of science. Anne Eusterschulte and Glenn Most are two of the three co-editors of a bold new project, a lexicon of philological terminologies in 25 classical traditions, from Japan westwards all the way to the Mayan civilization. They will present for discussion and criticism some of the prospects and some of the challenges of this project.
Anne Eusterschulte studied Fine Arts, German Literature, and Philosophy. Since 2007 she is professor for history of philosophy at the FU Berlin. Her main fields of research are the reception of ancient thought, medieval and early modern philosophy, rhetorics and aesthetics, philosophy of religions, and social philosophy.
Glenn W. Most is professor of Greek Philology at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa and on the Committee on Social Thought, University of Chicago. He studied Classics and Comparative Literature in Europe and the United States, and has taught at the Universities of Yale, Princeton, Michigan, Siena, Innsbruck, Heidelberg, and Paris. He has published books on Classics, on the history and methodology of Classical studies, on the Classical tradition and Comparative Literature, on literary theory, and on the history of art.