Oliver Primavesi

A Classical scholar of Greek antiquity, Oliver Primavesi is Professor of Greek Philology at Munich's Ludwig Maximilian University. A specialist in original Greek texts by Aristotle and Empedocles, he has received numerous awards, including the Leibniz Prize in 2007.

You are a Classical scholar working on Ancient Greek philosophy. Why does Ancient philosophy need Classical scholarship?

The original Greek works by the great philosophers of Antiquity like Plato and Aristotle have been transmitted by Ancient papyrus fragments and by medieval parchment or paper codices. Before contemporary philosophers can study and evaluate these works from a systematical point of view, the texts and the manuscripts transmitting them stand in need of being identified, deciphered, edited, explained, and, last not least, translated into a modern vernacular: these are precisely the core tasks of Classical Scholars. Yet there is often a curious mismatch between the high standard of precision aimed at by modern philosophers in reconstructing the arguments of the Ancients on the one hand, and the unreliability of the object, i.e. the available translations which they have to use for that purpose, on the other. The latter tend to depend on outdated editions from the 19th or the early 20th century, which took into account only a small random selection of the manuscript evidence known today. As long as we take a serious interest in the Ancient quest for wisdom, we will be drawing on Classical scholarship.

Which Greek philosophers are the main focus of your work? What recent project are you most enthusiastic about?

In my research, I have mainly focused on the two Greek philosophers that need the work of Classical scholars most urgently: Aristotle and Empedocles. The works of Aristotle, 4th century BCE, have been directly transmitted by more than 1.000 Greek manuscripts. In order to select the important ones, you need to assess all of them. Yet even a catalogue of all these manuscripts has been available only since 1963, and the investigation of them is still in its infancy; the same holds for the assessment of the medieval Arabic and Latin translations, often based on independent Greek manuscripts now lost. For this reason, I have taken part in the ongoing attempt at preparing reliable texts of Aristotelian works.

The case of Empedocles, a pre-Socratic philosopher-poet of the mid-5th century BCE, is quite different, but no less interesting. His two philosophical poems, Purifications and On Nature, were lost during the Middle Ages. What we have had so far, is a considerable number of quotations from both poems preserved in extant works of Ancient literature, as well as many remarks by later ancient philosophers who summarize, build upon, or criticize passages from them. In recent times, however, there have been remarkable discoveries of previously unknown Empedoclean texts. First, two considerable fragments of an Ancient papyrus edition of the poem On Nature, one discovered in the Bibliothèque Nationale et Universitaire de Strasbourg (BNUS) by Alain Martin (Brussels) in 1992, the other thirty years later in the archive of the Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale du Caire (IFAO) by Nathan Carlig (Liège). Second, the revolutionary Florentine scholia on Empedocles’ Cosmic Timetable, discovered in the biblioteca Medicea of Florence by Marwan Rashed (Sorbonne Université) in 2002. I have been involved in the editorial and exegetical work on all three findings right from the start, and my overarching aim is to develop a new picture of Empedocles that integrates all information now available.

How does your work contribute to contemporary discussions on classical scholarship’s role in modern academia?

The core competences of Classical scholarship as a historical discipline, as I understand it, are a reliable knowledge of (i) Greek and Latin languages and literatures, (ii) Ancient and medieval manuscripts, (iii) literary forms, and (iv) cultural contexts. Scholars who make a point of relentlessly training themselves in these competences, and who put them to use in a transparent, argumentative way, seem to be in a good position to earn the respect and win the support of open-minded colleagues from other disciplines and faculties, too, including the natural sciences. This is especially true if their work should turn out to be relevant for basic problems in our understanding of Ancient philosophy and science. By contrast, the use of Ancient texts (or of translations thereof) as a resource for the application and the enhancement of recent trends in literary criticism or cultural theory seems to be of a more limited appeal to modern academia as a whole.

What does this Sorbonne Honorary degree mean to you in the broader perspective of your career?

The honour that Sorbonne University is going to bestow on me is an especially moving one, since it comes not only from one of the most prestigious universities of the world, but also from an institution with the distinguished members of which I have been closely cooperating for many years. They repeatedly invited me to serve as an external member of Sorbonne committees and juries as well a as an examiner of doctoral theses and as a supervisor of theses prepared in cotutelle between Sorbonne University and my own university in Munich. Above all, however, I have found in Sorbonne University a colleague and friend, Professor Marwan Rashed, who is working with me on the ambitious project of a new edition of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, which will be the first to be based both on all independent Greek manuscripts and the medieval translations into Arabic and Latin. Seen against this personal background, it is hard to think of an honour that could mean more to me than this honorary doctorate.