Reviews of The Nay Science

International Journal of Dharma Studies, Oct 2016

Edward P. Butler, John R. Lenz, Antonio Luis Costa Vargas, Doug McGetchin, Bruce M. Sullivan, Jeffery D. Long, Robert Yelle, David Cerequas, Na’aman Hirschfeld, Veena R. Howard, et al.

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Reviews of The Nay Science

Butler et al. International Journal of Dharma Studies Reviews of The Nay Science Edward P. Butler 0 John R. Lenz 0 Antonio Luis Costa Vargas 0 Doug McGetchin 0 Bruce M. Sullivan 0 Jeffery D. Long 0 Robert Yelle 0 David Cerequas 0 Na'aman Hirschfeld 0 Veena R. Howard 0 Purushottama Bilimoria 0 0 The Nay Science: A History of German Indology By Vishwa Adluri, Joydeep Bagchee New York: Oxford University Press , 2014 Written in a soul: Notes toward a new (old) philology Acknowledgement: This essay was written by Edward P. Butler, Independent Scholar. The critique of German Indology in The Nay Science is aimed not merely at disclosing the ideologies and discourses of power animating the work of a certain body of researchers in a single subdiscipline of the humanities, but rather, as its Prologue reveals, at freeing space through this critique for the emergence of a new philology. German Indology proves the ideal point from which to launch this critique for several overlapping reasons. German Indology is linked to an event of world historical importance, namely the project of German nationalist intellectuals to appropriate for themselves an “Aryan” identity. Furthermore, German Indology constituted the cutting-edge of European intellectual response to the challenge of Indian thought, an unbroken polytheistic intellectual tradition reaching back to antiquity, which by its very existence implicitly called into question the sundered relationship of European thinkers to their own antiquity. And Indology provided a model for the application of the positivistic ideals of nineteenthcentury philology to the works of other civilizations which might similarly threaten to participate in the European intellectual conversation not as museum pieces, but as partners in real time, such as Chinese thought, or to complicate the European narrative about its own antiquity, such as the rediscovery of ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian thought, or about its colonial intentions, as the study of thought from the Americas and Africa. The critical undertaking launched by The Nay Science therefore must continue to stimulate self-criticism in a host of other philological disciplines, including, especially, Classics, insofar as modern philology is grounded in the peculiar relationship of modern European thought to its roots in pagan antiquity, a relationship of appropriation and would-be sublation implicitly presented as a model to contemporary non-Western civilizations of the relationship to which they might aspire regarding their own traditions, with or without the adjunct proffered them by Christian missionaries. Alongside this critical effort, though, must come the effort toward discerning the principles of a new philology embodying the Platonic sense of a philia or eros toward logos or discourse, in which the search for psychogonic value in texts would be recognized as inseparable from their technical grasp. The Nay Science, with uncommon discipline, deploys the gray archival work of Foucauldian genealogy in the service of this possibility, that future scholars might, looking up from the texts over which © 2016 The Author(s). Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. - they are bent, feel once again Boreas’s breeze, and it is in service of this project that I wish to contribute some thoughts on philology as it might glimpse itself in Plato’s Phaedrus and in another ancient text on writing that has only recently come to light. The recourse to ancient texts in this regard is not a matter of mere recourse to tradition or age as authority. Rather, I wish to argue that it is their comprehensive vision of the situation of the text in relation to mortal being that makes such texts a natural place for us to look for theoretical orientation for a new philology—more so, I believe, than potential alternatives such as Nietzsche or Spinoza, though I do not intend to argue the latter case here. The Phaedrus is well known for its supposed critique of writing; however, throughout the dialogue Socrates shows a high degree of sensitivity to the nature of texts, and a solicitude toward them that is not in conflict with his account of the text as having no power to defend itself from misappropriation (275e) any more than with his playful probing of the limits of textual correctness, such as when he knowingly quotes a spurious poem of Homer’s (252b–c), or says that he is a sufficient mantis for his own purposes, “as the bad writers say” (242c). When Socrates speaks of being a philologos, of being an erastēs of logoi (228c) and so forth, he does not distinguish between spoken and written texts. Thu (...truncated)


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Edward P. Butler, John R. Lenz, Antonio Luis Costa Vargas, Doug McGetchin, Bruce M. Sullivan, Jeffery D. Long, Robert Yelle, David Cerequas, Na’aman Hirschfeld, Veena R. Howard, Purushottama Bilimoria. Reviews of The Nay Science, International Journal of Dharma Studies, 2016, pp. 10, Volume 4, Issue 1, DOI: 10.1186/s40613-016-0033-9