At the center of GHI’s Mandala Eye, the AREA EXPERT HUB houses our community of scholars working across the world’s major philological and cultural traditions. Their highly specialized expertise enables GHI to create new global, comparative knowledge about human societies and the human experience in deep time and space. Members serve various of GHI’s projects and some also offer consultancy services.
Manifesto for a Generative Philology: Philology 2.0 for Human Flourishing
Philology—literally the “Love” of “Words,” “Arguments” or “Learning”—is an art and science that has manifested diversely across world history as communities developed strategies to collect, understand, institutionalize, and communicate textual or oral traditions in a particular language. Together with philosophy, philology has been the regal discipline of Western academia, ever since “philologists” at the behest of the Egyptian rulers began to curate and teach a canon of classical Greek literature and philosophy in Alexandria starting in the third century BCE. Philology has been tremendously productive, spawning many academic fields including biblical and “oriental” philologies, Classics, comparative linguistics, textual criticism, hermeneutics, bibliography, even literary studies, anthropology, archeology—paleography and epigraphy— and comparative religious studies. In other macro-regions, for example in China and East Asia, philology also emerged in close connection with the state, as bibliographers were appointed by the Han Dynasty (206 BCE-220 CE) emperors to order the imperial library and developed what we might call a “Confucian hagiography of the book,” which posited a grand vision of the primeval unity of knowledge, destroyed after the death of the great sage Confucius, and declining into various intellectual filiations, which in turn were attached to ancient political offices. Starting since the Han Dynasty, scholars created both a canon of Confucian Classics and a grand scheme of textual study and textual production in the four bibliographical categories of “Classics,” “Philosophical Masters,” “Histories,” and “Literary Collections,” increasingly through the broader scientific pursuit of the “investigation of things” (gewu 格物). East Asian philology developed a particularly strong commentarial culture and strong traditions, among others, in compilation and edition studies, bibliography, paleography, phonology, exegesis, empirical “evidential” philology, literary and scientific encyclopedias, calligraphic, archeological and art historical textual connoisseurship and, today, studies of excavated texts—fields that are less legible in today’s academic disciplines, which derive from Western-style education systems adopted globally under colonial or semi-colonial circumstances over the past couple of centuries.
Today largely reviled or satirized as a quixotic obsession with dusty texts by myopic, male, and maladaptive scholars, philology has currently a come-back in diverse forms of “world philology”—a testimony to the increasing realization that philology is a universal feature of human societies with a rich diversity of regional and local repertoires worthy of study in historical connection and functional comparison. We indeed need new visions and practices of philology, as we are facing fateful cuts to all historical studies of the world’s premodern societies, begin to slide into collective amnesia, are losing the ability to understand historically deep-rooted ethnic and religious conflicts that currently sweep the planet, are seeing a drastic loss of lexical, conceptual, critical and ethical literacy top-down, from our politicians to school children, and panic over dystopic visions of how artificial intelligence will brainwash the human race and incapacitate our education systems. This is the moment where we need a novel philology. A new global generative philology: Philology 2.0 for Human Flourishing. GHI’s Area Expert Hub is currently creating a manifesto for its vision.