Philology : the forgotten origins of the modern humanities

by James Turner

Paper Book, 2015

Status

Available

Call number

409

Genres

Publication

Princeton : Princeton University Press, 2015.

Description

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.… (more)

Media reviews

Bryn Mawr Classical Review

Until recently, there were numerous academic circles in which one could reveal oneself to be a philologist only at great peril. In the company of many humanists or social scientists—to say nothing of colleagues in more quantitative disciplines, who might not even recognize the word—to claim to

be a philologist could excite at best condescension, at worst denunciation. Like a covert drug habit or a particularly bizarre romantic predilection, even if you did philology, it was better not to admit it. This is not to say that there have not been a few attempts at consciousness-raising: over the last thirty years Paul de Man, Lee Patterson, and Edward Said all issued independent proclamations in declaring a ‘return’ to philology; more recently H.-U. Gumbrecht essayed its ‘powers’. That these well-intended efforts massively diverged in their basic understanding of the term supplied eloquent witness to philology’s beleaguered place in the landscape of knowledge over the past generation. But things have been looking up of late. The Indologist Sheldon Pollock has issued a series of impassioned appeals to the field’s global significance, both past and present (full disclosure: Pollock was my doctoral supervisor), while the Berlin-based project Zukunftsphilologie has worked to foster cross-disciplinary and transregional networks of scholarly communication, especially among younger researchers (further disclosure: I am a member of the project’s Collegium). Into these improving circumstances comes James Turner’s Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities. Turner, an intellectual historian whose previous work includes a well-received study of Charles Eliot Norton and a history of the rise of the academic study of religion, here takes up the millennia-long and transcontinental development through which the study of the Mediterranean classical literary inheritance came to speciate into the disciplines of the liberal arts and divinity faculties of the modern Anglophone university. Turner seeks to fundamentally upend the anti-philological prejudice—or even innocence of philology’s continued existence—that is endemic among contemporary humanists. The misrecognition of philology’s place extends beyond just the widely shared ignorance of the common ancestry of such apparently diverse fields as anthropology and the history of art: in forgetting their collective philological origins, the members of the fields are rendered unable, he claims, to comprehend the underlying shared core of their intellectual practice. Though Turner’s method is that of conventional narrative history, his intention could thus be described as a process of eliminatio scientiarum descriptarum, as the apparent diversity of the modern disciplines is progressively revealed to overlay an original unitary philology, consisting in comparison, knowledgeable interpretation, and sensitivity to context. For it is this triune unity that Turner understands to be exhaustive of philology as the ur- (or über-) discipline.

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User reviews

LibraryThing member NielsenGW

In Philology, James Turner makes a fun and rather interesting assertion: all studies in the humanities lead back to philology, the study of languages and their history. In order to engage in the studia humanitatis, you need history. In order to read history in its proper context, you have to read

it in its original language. For that you need an understanding of languages, their structure and their history, hence philology. To understand art and architecture requires context, and the urge to understand it as its contemporaries did. This requires chronicles, journals, letters, and yes, philology. Turner traces the grand study of philology through history to show its roots and how it can be again reborn as a proper tool for understanding both our current circumstances and our collective history.

Starting with ancient Chinese and Sanskrit manuals on language organization and construction, he guides the reader through eras in philological study. Early in its day, it was the go-to field for those writing about history, philosophy, or theology. All through Western history and even into 19th century America, philology is found to form the basis for any “complete” education. He moves the narrative between poets, educators, philosophers, artists, and even mathematicians to show how the field of philology both informs and is informed by everything else. Language forms in many ways the common bond between human beings, and so philology seeks to understand those bonds from the inside out.

Turner’s research on this topic is immense and rich. Even though he hedges in his introduction that this book comes up short and his understanding of ancient languages is paltry at best, he still gets across a ton of information and history. The writing is a little stuffy, but so is the subject matter. Philology is by necessity a very minutiae-driven field, so some of the sections tend to feel a bit pedantic. Trust me, if you stick it out, you get a better understanding of what we call the humanities. He laments the fact that a generalist in the humanities could not exist in today’s educational atmosphere of specialization, and in many ways I feel much the same way. Reading this will awaken the polymath in all of us, and hopefully a brave few will make a go of it as a career. All in all, a very interesting read.

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LibraryThing member Shrike58

What to say about this sprawling history of everything? Most precisely this is an examination of why there was even an endeavor of philology, as at various times and places thoughtful people saw fit to try and put received texts (be they actual texts or artifacts) into some contextual understanding

that made sense to them, with Philology in its prime being the main tool in the effort to retrieve the learning of the Classical World. The real interest for Turner is then institutional, as how such distinct disciplines as History, Literature, Linguistics, Anthropology and the like coalesced and then professionalized, in a process one can compare to crystals materializing out of a super-saturated solution. Much of this would seem to boil down to the stresses between institutional empire-building on one hand and the failure of the center to hold in terms of revealed religion being the center of culture, as the fears of the pious came to pass that better understanding would undermine simple faith, once the Bible became just more grist for the analytic mill.

Turner essentially takes his story up into the mid 19th-century before stopping, but he does have some thoughts on what the future might hold for the Humanities in academia, assaulted on all sides by issues of relevance, resources and mission. One suggestion that Turner makes is that the practitioners of these disciplines could take a note from the physical sciences and spend less time in their self-imposed definitions of their missions and work at building links between their various endeavors; united by the love of the word. Turner sees cross-disciplinary efforts such as gender and environmental studies as being a positive boon in this regard.

If nothing else the investment of time in this book made me appreciate quite a bit more what the rise of the German cultural studies post-1792 meant to world intellectual development as a whole.

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