More specifically concerning: scholarly truth
Compendium academicorum
27 November 2002, around 16.42.
Within this field, which no single scholar can create but which each scholar receives and in which he then finds a place for himself, the individual researcher makes his contribution. Such contributions, even for the exceptional genius, are strategies of redisposing material within the field. Even the scholar who unearths a once-lost manuscript produces the […]
Shortcuts
19 May 2003, around 7.48.
In a papyrologist’s dream world, every office would have a recent monograph devoted to it; so would every institution, every tax, every contract type, and so on. Many of these monographs, it must be admitted, are not very interesting to read, and most of them are undoubtedly cited far more often than they are read. […]
errare humanum est
3 June 2003, around 8.10.
I picked up a copy of the book by chance the other day, and started reading it last night. Not that I’ve gotten very far enough to say anything about it, save that it is provoking: Being wrong is also about being displaced, about wandering, dissenting, emigrating, and alienating. The professionalization of the scholar, and, […]
An Errant Academic
10 July 2003, around 13.44.
I mentioned Seth Lerer’s Error and the Academic Self more than a month ago and, having finally finished reading it, there are a few more comments I would like to make. To begin, though, with a summary: errô, errare, erravi, erratus – to wander, to go astray, to err. The record of scholarship, particularly of […]
hermetically
12 February 2004, around 16.46.
8. Philaletheia, the disinterested love of scholarly truth, can lead one into some strange places. The connection of the two marginalia is the urge to recover the sense of an ancient text in full and accurately; to probe past the obscurity of poet and translator alike, to what Lycophron’s persona thought was to happen in […]
Citation (45)
31 March 2012, around 17.59.
scholarly limitations…
Too Much to Know
4 August 2023, around 8.21.
By Ann M. Blair, Yale UP, 2010.
a critical perspective
20 May 2024, around 7.26.
The forger, in sum, treats his reader as a flight simulator treats a pilot; he offers a vivid image of the specific text and situation that he seeks to represent, but only a vague and obviously unreal one of their periphery. Like the pilot in training, the reader in question is mesmerized by the deliberately […]