A Suggested Reform in the Syllabuses of Philology and Philosophy

Abstract

As happened in the conflict between von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff and Nietzsche, even today there are philologists who do not believe that philosophy is a respectable science. One of them is Tom Shippey, a scholar of English and Germanic philology. In this paper I want to argue two things: 1) that in the golden age of philology, the major philologists were directly influenced by the philosophers; 2) that in a reform of the faculty of Arts and Humanities it would be possible to improve the syllabus of Philology linking it to philosophical texts, and to improve the syllabus of Philosophy by immersing it in the history of philosophy and its texts.