Friedrich August Wolf

File:Friedrich August Wolf - Imagines philologorum.jpg

Friedrich August Wolf

Friedrich August Wolf (Template:IPAc-en; Template:IPA; 15 February 1759 – 8 August 1824) was a German classicist who is considered the founder of classical and modern philology.

Biography

Wolf was born in Hainrode, near Nordhausen. His father was the village schoolmaster and organist. In grammar school, he studied Latin and Greek as well as French, Italian, Spanish, and music.Template:Sfn

In 1777, after two years of independent study, at the age of eighteen, Wolf went to the University of Göttingen.Template:Sfn Legend has it that he chose to enroll in the department of "philology", despite the fact that the university had none. His enrollment was nonetheless accepted as submitted.Template:Citation needed At the time Christian Gottlob Heyne was a member of the faculty. Heyne excluded Wolf from his lectures, and criticized Wolf's views on Homer. Wolf was undeterred and pursued his studies through the university's library.Template:Sfn

From 1779 to 1783, he taught at Ilfeld and Osterode. He published an edition of Plato's Symposium, and in 1783, he was awarded a chair at the University of Halle in Prussia.Template:Sfn

It was in Halle (1783–1807), with the support of ministers serving under Frederick the Great, that Wolf first laid down the principles of the field he would call "Philology".<ref name="Klein2012">Template:Cite book</ref> He defined philology as the study of human nature as exhibited in antiquity. Its methods include the examination of the history, writing, art and other examples of ancient cultures. It combines the study of history and language, through interpretation, in which history and linguistics coalesce into an organic whole. This was the ideal of Wolf's philological seminarium at Halle.

During Wolf's time at Halle he published his commentary on the Leptines of Demosthenes (1789), which influenced his student Philipp August Böckh.Template:Sfn He also published the Prolegomena ad Homerum (1795), which led to accusations of plagiarism by Heyne.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>

File:Medaille Friedrich August Wolf 1840.png

Medal Friedrich August Wolf 1840

The Halle professorship ended after the French invasion of 1806. He relocated to Berlin, where he received assistance from Wilhelm von Humboldt. Later he once more took a professorship, but he no longer taught with his old success, and he wrote very little. His most finished work, the Darstellung der Alterthumswissenschaft, though published at Berlin (1807), belongs essentially to the Halle time.Template:Sfn

Taking medical advice, Wolf travelled to the south but died on the road to Marseille, and was buried there. In 1840 a medal was struck in his honor.<ref>http://hdl.handle.net/10900/100742 S. Krmnicek und M. Gaidys, Gelehrtenbilder. Altertumswissenschaftler auf Medaillen des 19. Jahrhunderts. Begleitband zur online-Ausstellung im Digitalen Münzkabinett des Instituts für Klassische Archäologie der Universität Tübingen, in: S. Krmnicek (Hrsg.), Von Krösus bis zu König Wilhelm. Neue Serie Bd. 3 (Tübingen 2020), 69-71.</ref>

See also

• Hermeneutics<ref name="Hermen">Friedrich Schleiermacher, "Ueber den Begriff der Hermeneutik mit Bezug auf F. A. Wolfs Andeutungen und Asts Lehrbuch", lecture delivered on 13 August 1829; published in Friedrich Schleiermachers sämtliche Werke III/3, 1838 (Schleiermacher makes reference to Ast's Grundlinien der Grammatik, Hermeneutik und Kritik (1808) and Wolf's Vorlesungen über die Enzyklopädie der Altertumswissenschaft (1831)); Richard E. Palmer, Hermeneutics, Northwestern University Press, 1969, ch. 6.</ref>

References

Sources

• Template:Cite book
• Template:EB1911

Further reading

• Reinhard Markner, "Friedrich August Wolf. Eine Bibliographie."