[MD] Some historical perspective

[Matt Kundert]

Squonk said:
> Nietzsche blew away his contemporary academic view of 
> Ancient Greek philology and it became replaced with his own.

Matt:
That, I guess, scans as a different claim than the first one.  
And the clipped authority you give either one doesn't read 
one way or the other for me.  I can't really figure what 
you're saying.  Kaufmann's Nietzsche is, indeed, still a 
major force in Nietzsche scholarship after all these years, 
but I guess if the claim your suggesting is simply about 
German philology in the 19th century, I have to claim little 
knowledge, though if I remember correctly The Birth of 
Tragedy wasn't very well received at the time.  And 
philology never really had a lot of currency as a discipline 
outside of Germany, I don't think, which is probably why 
it wasn't well-received there, but had more pull in later 
Classics departments that were assimilating anthropology 
(I'm thinking especially of the so-called Cambridge School, 
Frazer, Harrison, Cornford, but also Oxonians like Murray, 
Dodds, and later his student Bernard Williams) and it's 
certainly hard to read later Germans without Nietzsche's 
blood staining the pages (Jaeger, Snell, Friedlander, let 
alone Heidegger).  But even here--Nietzsche was a point of 
departure for anthropologically-inclined classicists: they 
don't really hold his views, so far as I can see, and 
_particularly_ not Nietzsche's philosophical ones, which are 
the important ones (except for Williams, to a certain extent, 
but he was a philosopher, not a classicist).

I guess I'm not really sure what to make of the claim, let 
alone it's importance to something.

I guess the only reason I said anything was because the 
first thing you said sounded like there had been a sea 
change in anglophone philosophy while I had been napping 
and no one had told me.

Matt
 		 	   		  
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