Aufsätze zur griechischen Literatur und Philosophie

Homer and Sophocles, Plato and Aristotle: four great authors, who have let the essence of Greek culture appear with special clarity, are the focus of the collected essays by the Tübingen classical Greek scholar Thomas Alexander Szlezák. His approach to the poetic as to the philosophical texts is the same: the leading methodological principle has to be that of Alexandrian philology, namely to explicate each author from within himself. A novelty of considerable consequence is the application of the Alexandrian interpretive maxim to Plato: Schleiermacher’s misguided hermeneutic of the dialogues as self-sufficient works, which has found many followers to this day, must be corrected. Plato himself forces us to read the dialogues not only, but essentially also, as pointers to that theory of principles reported by Aristotle, yet deliberately excluded from his dialogues by Plato himself.