Projects in Greek Language and Literature
Prof. Dr. Markus Asper
Narratives in Science Writing
Since 2008, Markus Asper has been working on narrative structures in ancient and modern science texts and analysing them formally and functionally (latest publication: "Aristotelian Stories. (A Case Study of) Narrative in Knowledge-Making". In: Poetica 54 (2023), 1–26 [open access]).
ORGANON terminological toolbox
Together with Brigitte Grote, Werner Kogge and Jan Slaby (all FU), a tool is being developed that facilitates work on terminology within interdisciplinary research networks and provides it with a publication-ready basis. The project has been funded by the BUA for 2022–23, and an application is currently being to the DFG (German Research Foundation) LIS programme in early 2024 (for an impression, please see: https://gkorganon.userpage.fu-berlin.de/)
Completed:
Experts and their Microcosms
Experts operate in microcosms, in fields that they construct, delimit, differentiate, and develop. The project, partly funded by EXC TOPOI II, produced three edited volumes (ed. M. Asper at de Gruyter series STMAC): Writing Science (2013), Thinking in Cases (2020) and Coming to Terms (2024)
Boeckhs Encyklopädie
August Boeckh, the founder of our Institute, gave his great “Encyclopaedia” Lecture an incredible 26 times (1810-1865). Many who went on to become important intellectuals in Berlin attended these lectures. The colossal manuscript, with numerous supplements, has been critically edited by Christiane Hackel with various appendices, using the preliminary work of Klaus Grotsch (3 vols., Hamburg 2023). The endeavour was funded by the Thyssen Foundation and the Berliner Antike-Kolleg.
Dr. Giulia Maria Chesi
The Feminine Turn
The Feminine Turn is an international research group. It aims at reassessing and re-evaluating the ethical, political, and epistemological value of female agency in Graeco-Roman fictive and scientific literature, and its reception in the Renaissance, by queering the canonical boundaries of female and male.
Trilaterale Forschungskonferenzen an der Villa Vigoni (Italien)
Protection of the Persecuted and the Weak in Western Culture. Interrelations between historical practice and the literary design of ancient pagan and Christian models.
Project leaders: Stefan Freund (Bergische Universität Wuppertal, Classical Philology); Michelet Cutino (Université de Strasbourg, Ancient Church History and Early Christian Literature); Giuseppe Germano (Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II, Medieval and Modern Latin).
PD Dr. Roberto Lo Presti
The Place Within (The Inner Sanctum)
A study on a metaphor complex in the history of philosophy, theology and ideas
What do figurative concepts such as Marcus Aurelius’ and Theresa of Avila’s “inner castle”, the “caves of memory” and Augustine’s “inner man (homo interior)”, the “heart mysticism” of the early Greek Church Fathers and the „prayer of the heart“ of the desert fathers of the Philokalia, Peter Abelard’s “root of intention” and Meister Eckhart’s “ground of the soul” have in common? Are they only apparently related, but in fact independent idioms, or are we dealing with a coherent complex of metaphors and concepts that emerge in different (philosophical and theological) forms of discourse, which presuppose and express a fundamental intuition and develop over several centuries in different intellectual and cultural contexts? And, if it is indeed a complex that transcends the boundaries between Greco-Roman pagan culture and Christian faith as well as between philosophy and theology, to what extent can its reconstruction in the history of ideas help 1) to shed new light on the relationship between philosophical and Christian discourse on God, man and the world, and 2) to better understand the processes of rethinking this relationship from the early Neo-Christian period through the Middle Ages to the modern era?
These are the questions that this book project aims to answer.
Dr. Loren D. Marsh
A Terminological Commentary on the Poetics of Aristotle
The purpose of this project is to develop a new theoretical understanding of Aristotle's unusual terminological practice, and then apply that understanding to the extensive terminological problems found in the Poetics. Since the Poetics is the most terminologically controversial of Aristotle's works, this short but dense treatise is ideally suited for a focused investigation of a range of crucial terms within a single field. The results of this investigation can be expected to produce a clearer – and in some respects profoundly different – understanding of Aristotle's theory of art and literature. But as the first study dedicated entirely to terminology in Aristotle, this analysis is expected to offer fresh insights into how terms found in all of his writings can be systematically identified, classified, explained and defined.
Dr. Thomas Poiss
Co-opted member (a projected individual sub-project had to be withdrawn due to serious illness in 2021) in the DFG Research Unit
FOR 5323: Aetiologies: Figures and Functions of Justifying Narratives in Science and Literature
The research group “Aetiologies” focuses on the fascination with beginnings and the search for origins from the point of view of their present and retrospective construction and functionalisation. Stories of beginnings — viewed with the heuristic instrument of aetiology (the narrative of beginnings, reasons, and causes) — contain political, aesthetic, religious, and life-science programmes for the respective present which they justify. Cosmologies, creation narratives, literary and scientific primal scenes as well as political founding narratives are analysed with a view to their respective ‘rhetorics of time’. The argumentative tone of aetiological narratives draws attention to the interface between literature and science and focuses on knowledge discourses in literature and the fictionalisation of scientific hypotheses. The question is always whether beginnings are ideologically or metaphysically glorified or whether (and how) literary processes tend to work towards a de-mystification that calls linearity and causality into question. Finally, the focus on beginnings links the research programme with the current interest in eras of the earth’s history that are coming to an end and their own aetiology — both in aesthetic and political discourses.
For further information see the website of the research unit.
PD Dr. Vadim Wittkowsky
“Rewriting” in the Gospels and Acta of the New Testament corpus: a reference work
Research in recent decades has led to many new insights into how different and yet often recurring texts of the New Testament corpus relate to one another. This is not only the case in similar-looking narratives in the Gospels, but also in many passages that earlier comparative studies and synopses ignored as “special material”. A comprehensive reference work is planned which will document the numerous cases of so-called "rewriting" in the four Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles as completely as possible.
The intertextuality of late canonical literary works: Ovid, Luke, Heliodorus
Classical philologists, cultural scholars and theologians have different ideas about the term “canon”. In any case, it is clear that there is such a thing as canonical writings and also certain processes leading to their canonisation. What is less well known is that the canonisation processes already begin with the authors themselves, who will then belong to a particular canon. By comparing the texts of the three imperial authors, we will examine the question of how these three “late classics” — Ovid, Luke, and Heliodorus — consciously provided themselves canonical status.
PD Dr. Lothar Willms
Eleutheria: History of the Greek concept of freedom: Archaeology of a European core concept
The aim of this project which is funded since June 2022 by the Heisenberg programme of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) is an outline of the evolution of the idea of freedom in Ancient Greece from the Mycenaean Age to Late Antiquity. Documentary and literary texts are included to elucidate the first phases of this notion (personal and political freedom). The focus is on philosophical texts that yield the largest differentiation of the concept of freedom (moral and internal freedom, freedom of the ‘will’).
Freedom is one of the basic ideas that have informed the intellectual and political life of the West. This pre-eminent role started in classical antiquity, when the basic features of the concept of freedom were developed in Greece. The aim of the project, which is funded since June 2022 by the Heisenberg Programme of the German Research Foundation (DFG), is to produce a monograph that outlines the evolution of the Greek concept of freedom from the beginnings to Late Antiquity. Structuralist semiotics provides the main methodological tool. When dealing with the history of the idea of freedom in Antiquity previous research used indistinctly and anachronistically the modern language expression ‘free(dom)’ for both terms and concepts. The clear structuralist distinction between a concept (signified) and its linguistic designation (signifier) allows a more accurate description of when a given concept of freedom emerged and when it and the term denoting it (e.g. prohairesis ‘freedom of choice‘, eph’ hêmîn ‘freedom of the will’) were linked to the lexeme ‘free’. Moreover, the project’s large chronological range which spans two millennia and encompasses all of classical antiquity makes it possible to trace the development of the notion of freedom by following the emergence and unfolding of genres and intellectual approaches from Archaic Greece onwards, shifting, with evidence increasing and diversifying, continually the focus to the most innovative group of texts: from personal freedom in PIE etymology and the Mycenaean period to political freedom (both of the polis and citizen) in archaic poetry and prose to the philosophical concept of freedom, which forms the focus of the study and which unfolds through the various philosophical directions from moral freedom to freedom of choice, freedom of the will and inner freedom to the metaphysical freedom of the One in Plotinus. In a last chapter, Christian understanding of freedom in Antiquity will be elucidated as a contrastive foil. An outlook will investigate the role which the ancient concept of freedom played in the development of modern concepts of human dignity.