A “coffee-break” conference on Asian studies

June 15, 2010 by Daniel Stender · Leave a comment · Printer friendly version
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Lo studio dell’Asia fra antico e moderno – giornate di studio, Rome, 10.-12.06.2010

To hold a conference which leaves behind the more stiff formulations of established and untouchable conclusions, and favours an open minded exchange of ideas, suggestions, criticisms in Italy was suggested by Elisa Freschi on her blog in March (here), and it really did not take long until that “coffee-break” conference took place a few days before at the Sapienza University of Rome in the Facoltà di Studi Orientali.

The presentations were held in six panels on linguistics and texts, manuscriptology and literature, on Development studies, and Asian history of art. To regroup the contributions of the English spoken panels without the Development studies on the basis of the discussed fields of study in matters of languages resp. literatures here (in order of appearance at the conference):

Arianna D’Ottone (Rome) presented the Arabic Manuscript Vaticano 368, Elisabetta Benigni (Rome) Arabic literature and western canon.
Michela Clemente (Rome) spoke on the Search of stylictic models for the identification of Tibetan xylographs, Illona Manewskaya (Manchester) on Tibetan medical didactic poetry.
Mark Schneider (Hamburg) introduced the project Manuscript Cultures in Asia and Africa and its sub-project on Japanese manuscripts, Luca Milasi (Rome) spoke on historical fiction in Meiji Japan.
Kengo Harimoto (Hamburg) presented the oldest Nepalese manuscripts of the NGMCP, Alessandro Graheli (Vienna) spoke on the textual sources of the Nyāyamañjarī, Adheesh Sathaye (Vancouver) on the Mahābhārata, Elisa Ganser (Leiden) on the Nāṭyaśāstra and related texts, Artemio Keidan (Rome) on layers in the Aṣṭādhyāyī, and Rosaria Compagnone (Naples) on the Pādmasaṃhitā.
Sara Kaczko (Rome) spoke about textual criticism in Classical philology, Carlo Vesella (Rome) on Late Classical Greek phonology.
Luca Alfieri (Rome) presented on the adjectives in Vedic literature, Leonid Kulikov (Leiden) on the history of the PIE case system, Frank Köhler (Tübingen) on RV 1,60 (Dīrghatamas cycle), Paola Rossi (Milano) on śakti and Luca Picardi (Naples) on triḥ sapta and ekaviṃśa/ti in the Veda

(the abstracts are available on the conference’s web site). The conference was very interesting and it can be seen that there was a broad range of relevant presentations which the organizers were able to bring together. A whole panel was dedicated to contributions towards Development studies (see the bundled panel abstracts here). Although there were some concerns it could be too boring for the majority of the present philologists the presentations in that panel were very interesting and I’ve learned that the discipline is relatively new in Italy and follows some very own approaches. The panel inspired to get somewhat deeper into that and the conference proceedings which are going to appear are planned to contain a separate survey of the recent Development studies in Italy. Seen how well the conference was convened it could be supposed that the proceedings are going to appear very soon (given that everybody is sending in his paper punctual). Because the majority of contributions on the whole conference was held by Italian scholars the event was also an unique opportunity even for the foreign guests to meet the Asian research in Italy. I am very glad to hear that the next Italian “coffee-break” conference is already planned for next year and maybe there is always enough demand to let this turn into a series.

I’ve made some pictures of the event, the gallery is here, and an archive of them could be found here (if the presenters that do not appear would please excuse – at the end the batteries have gone empty).

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A workshop on Indian logic and epistemology

June 7, 2010 by Daniel Stender · 1 comment · Printer friendly version
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Modern formalisms for Pre-modern Indian logic and epistemology – interdisciplinary workshop, Hamburg, 04.-06.06.2010

On the past weekend a worshop on classical Indian logic and epistemology took place at the University of Hamburg which was convened by the Asien-Afrika-Institut (AAI) and the Department of Mathematics and was sponsored by the Faculty of Mathematics, Informatics and Natural Sciences (MIN). The event brought together a bunch of experts from different fields of Classical Indian philology as well as of Logic. In the experimental nature of this gathering the organizers of the workshop saw a chance to generate a new momentum for the research of both involved disciplines could benefit from – the, let’s call it “western tradition” of research in logics has great interest to get also into the Old Indian philosophical systems which requires the cooperation of philologists while Indology naturally has limits to interpret the old texts also in regards to the latest research in fundamental exact sciences (I hope this is the right term) and could also benefit from an exchange. I think the conference indeed brought a lot interesting insights from each the other discipline and I would say everyone would agree that such a cooperation couldn’t be other than fruitful for both sciences, Indology could gain an advance in legitimation (things like Buddhist logic in the latest generation of Blue Ray players could be ultimate fundraisers) while the modern systems of logic and epistemology have the chance to get new challenging objects from the extremely rich and deep Indian culture for developing themselves. That concepts like the differentiation of research and subject matter as well as the notion of “the modern age” and its advance dissolves under this approach is another issue which for me this workshop brought up again.

If at all possible to group the contributions that took place completely, to begin with that a large part of the conference was dedicated to the field of research in Jainism, namely the presentations of Piotr Balcerowicz (Warsaw), Melanie Barbato (Munich) and Marie-Hélène Gorisse (Lille). Needles to say, Jainism definitely plays an important role in the history of Indian philosophy and so philosophical resp. logical or epistemological concepts also from that tradition like the saptabhaṅgī, the “sevenfold predication” and the anekantavāda doctrine of the immanent multiplicity of viewpoints are challenging objects in order to penetrate them throughout. Also the lectures on Buddhism have managed to problematize significantly the things that are to be found in this philosophy. So Birgit Kellner (Heidelberg) spoke about the cognitive predicated in the inferences from non-perception in the works of the Pramāṇa scholar Dharmakīrti (approx. 600-660 AD), while other lectures were dedicated to the Madhyamaka teacher Nāgārjuna (approx. 150-200 AD) – namely the ones of Laurent Keiff (Lille) and Graham Priest (Melbourne). Priest spoke about the problems of penetrating the catuṣkoṭi as it is implied in the Mūlamadhyamakakārikās formally adequately in terms of paraconsistent logics which demonstrated how challenging Old Indian philosophy could be even for the most advanced in “modern” non-classical logic.* The necessity of such an approach was confirmed also by the presentation of Sara Uckelman (Amsterdam), who is researching into Medieval logics and the challenge of their modelling. The pre-modern Indian logic shows certain similarities to that tradition which also is very challenging to understand them in terms of modern formal logic: some medieval systems need to be described with – again – even the latest contemporary science like Dynamic epistemic logic, Dialogical logic, etc. Finally, the talks of Claus Oetke (Stockholm) and Klaus Glashoff (Lugano) even deepened some the problems of modelling resp. formalization Classical Indian logic, while Wilfrid Hodges‘ (London) talk about the Ibn Sīnā’s philosophical comments on and additions to Aristoteles broadened the historical logic as it was already presented in the workshop – all that here only to highlight a very few of what was presented.

A few slides and presentations already appeared on the page of the workshop and hopefully more are going to be found here soon. At the end of the conference it was attempted to establish further forms of cooperation and from events such as this may even some mixed projects may result. The organizers would like to see the workshop to be in a number of other events like this and hopefully some of the issue which were raised here are going to be further discussed.

* See L.R. Horn’s article on Contradiction in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The term “classical modern logic” denotes the systems up to Modal logic and PWS. On Non-classical logic see Priest’s An introduction to non-classical logic. 2nd edition. Cambridge (usw.): University Press 2008 (on FDE see chapter 22).

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Among the yavanas: from the Teuchos Conference

April 30, 2010 by Daniel Stender · Leave a comment · Printer friendly version
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Handschriften und Textforschung heute – eine Konferenz zur Überlieferung der griechischen Literatur anlässlich des 70. Geburtstags von Dieter Harlfinger, veranstaltet vom Hamburger Teuchos-Zentrum. Hamburg, 21.-23. April 2010

Lázló Horváth (Budapest) on what has survived of Hypereides

The Teuchos Project at the Institut für griechische- und lateinische Philologie (IGRLAT) of the University of Hamburg convened a conference on Greek manuscriptology and textual research which took place last week in the State and University Library and other facilities on the campus. The event, which was held in honour of the former holder of the 2nd chair of Classical philology in Hamburg, Dieter Harlfinger, brought together several esteemed scholars of the several disciplines of Ancient Greek philology and allied fields. Unfortunately the conference was under the influence of the 2010 eruptions of the Eyjafjallajökull on Iceland and the aircraft grounding all over Europe which that incident effected – a true nightmare for the organizers. Although the catastrophe had effects like that that all expected scholars from the U.S. couldn’t made it to the conference the team managed to organized a thoroughly successful event anyhow. Since some presenters from Europe which were expected to hold the first panel have failed to get there on time the jubilee took over improvising a concise general introduction into Ancient Greek manuscriptology which was accompanied by the presentation of some of the precious parchment manuscripts which are kept in the State Library and which were brought by on very short notice – a surprisingly very successful beginning for an event under such difficult circumstances!

The whole conference was full of interesting presentations like the one of Philip van der Eijk (Berlin) – holder of one of the new, prestigious Alexander-von-Humboldt-Professuren – on the Corpus Hippocraticum, a remarkable phenomenon of the Greek tradition, and of – when I got that right – the disciples of Harlfinger, Sofia Kotzabassi (Thessaloniki) on the transmission of letter corpora at the times of the Palailogoi in the Byzantine Empire and Ángel Escobar Chico (wo came to the conference by car from Saragossa) on the medieval Latin translations of Aristotle’s work On dreams (de insomniis) - to pick just a very a few of them I had the time to join (for this I couldn’t mention the Festvorträge here). But for lay auditors like me which are not that that deep into the several distinctive and current problems of Greek literary history many of the top-notch science presentations which were held here unfortunately had to remain informative on a mere general level, although everywhere basic assumptions and techniques could be estimated also from the perspective of Indian literary history with its own issues, but related fundamental problems. That manuscriptology should be seen in a broader, intercultural perspective was again underlined by the lectures of Michael Friedrich and Jörg Quenzer (Hamburg) on the Chinese and Japanese manuscript cultures (a picture of a presentable Sanskrit manuscript containing commentarial glosses which was shown in the context of an introduction into the approach of the research group Manuscript Cultures in Asia and Africa in fact evoked significant murmur about how similar this is to some of the Greek pieces). By the way, I’ve asked around what is the difference between the designation of “manuscriptology” (Handschriftenkunde) and of “codicology”: overall it has been defined that “manuscriptology” would mean the whole branch of science dealing with manuscripts while “codicology” could be seen as a subfield of manuscriptology which concentrates on features like pagination, distribution of text on the page, and so on, and is to be located alongside other subfields like palaeography. There are scientific circles in which “codicology” designates the whole area of manuscript studies and I have been told that this is the case in France, but this was considered to be a minority. Jörg Quenzer answered my question saying that for the whole area of Asian studies the term “manuscriptology” is proper just because here the research has to broaden its approach to cover also all the cultural details which have to do with the production and the use of manuscripts – a scope which is wider than it is in the Classical studies where manuscriptology as a branch of academic science has its origin – to prevent not to get marginalised in the light of the vast amount of the hitherto untreated manuscripts, like Michael Friedrich explained in his talk.

To report what’s been called “natural sciences in the humanities” here: two interesting presentations were dedicated to issue of “non-philological” examination of manuscripts. Oliver Hahn from the workgroup Kunst- und Kulturgutanalyse of the Federal Institute for Materials Research and Testing in Berlin (BAM, see here on the Nike workgroup) gave a presentation on the field of material analysis. One of the points he explained was that up to today unfortunately there is no non-invasive procedure for organic materials like manuscripts available, so that a C14 dating would always take a little piece of the specimen to be wasted. The discussion afterwards brought up the interesting question if it wouldn’t be possible to develop a method for dating epigraphs. After this, Jost Gippert (Frankfurt) gave an fascinating introduction into the use of multispectral photography in palimpsest research – it could be seen on the conference that palimpsests (re-used manuscripts) are really a major issue in Greek philology, more as it is in Indology (see for example on the famous Archimedes palimpsest which also contains otherwise not transmitted speeches by Hypereides: Netz/Noel: The Archimedes Codex – revealing the secrets of the world’s greatest palimpsest. London 2007) . The reason for this seems to have something to do with the nature of the different writing materials (is it, would it be an issue? Any comments?). To mention it in this context, the fact that one could get the impression that the number of manuscripts in this discipline is always rather limited has to be contrasted with that in Asia there are hundred thousands of hitherto completely unexamined items – carrying irreplaceable cultural treasures – which have to be taken into proper treatment immediately to prevent huge amounts of unique ancient texts to vanish irretrievably because of the critical climatic conditions.

Another very interesting presentation was the one of Holger Strutwolf who introduced the Editio Critica Maior (ECM) of the New Testament and other projects of the Institute for New Testament Textual Research (INTF) at the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster. The new critical edition of the New Testament seems to be one of the largest projects of edition: there are 5500 [!] known manuscripts carrying text of the New Testament and the transmission is highly contaminated as it is also usually the case in India – no way to create an overall stemma or to find more than just alternate potential dependencies of always only a very limited number of the items (a good introduction into textual criticism on the basis of even these problems: K. u. B. Aland: Der Text des neues Testaments. Einführung i.d. wissensch. Aufgaben sowie in Theorie und Praxis der modernen Textkritik. Stuttgart 1982). It was interesting to hear that a large part of this successful project here is mastered with the Collate software. The whole tool chain which was created by the ECM project could serve as a model also for editing one of the several high manuscript-volumed Sanskrit text. The discussion afterwards brought up interesting questions like the one about the treatment of interlinear marginals, and also other problems of collation and transliteration for digital processing were discussed. Furthermore Strutwolf and his assistant introduced their Virtual Manuscript Room (NT.VMR), another ambitious project of presenting all New Testament manuscripts online. A particular problem of this enterprise is the fact that the manuscripts are belonging to 550 [!] different institutions worldwide – a real organizational nightmare! The approach of the Manuscript Room is to bring the user into the position to have the opportunity to review the textual decisions of the editors most conveniently even down to their manuscriptual basis, for that all scans are going to be aligned with their transcripts for easy finding passages and controlling the textual basis which has been accepted or rejected. With this and from the other projects of digital philology which were presented at the conference it became clear that it is tried overall to achieve more than just making materials available through the world wide web in “just” scanning manuscripts and building digital corpora (what just would be a lot often).

On the conference there were several other presentations on or about digital philology: Alexandra Trachsel (Hamburg) spoke about the fragments of Demetrios of Skepsis and explained that the nature of them would demand to create a digital edition instead of a printed one. Annette Geßner (Leipzig) presented the subproject 4.2 The reception of Platon’s text in the ancient world of the Extraction of structures knowledge from ancient sources (eAqua) at the University Leipzig – a text mining project which so far is able to automatically detect citations of Platon’s Republic in the available digital corpora of Greek literature (literature: G. Boter: The textual tradition of Plato’s Republic. Leiden 1986). Because citations could occur also in paraphrases an appropriate key in form of a versatile search algorithm had to be developed which also has to cover also morphological variations (the tool Perseus Morpheus is used for that). This project is a good example for the profitable use of digital corpora. Particular successful I found it is to process relationships on ground of the results like: which parts of the basic work are cited more than the others by whom, and also to visualize facts in forms of bars, like: when Plato was cited more and when less – the peaks which stood out in the diagram clearly approved the epochs of Middle- and Neoplatonism mathematically. These results of the digital analysis of electronic corpora demonstrated once again to which insights digital philology could lead. The discussion which followed the lecture once more revolved around the usual problems of electronic texts like how orthographic ambiguities in the manuscripts could be regarded properly, and it was demanded that systems like that have to be open for later text improvements and dating corrections. To end with another contribution to edition software: in their presentation Gyula Mayer and Lázló Horváth (Budapest) demonstrated HypereiDoc, an editor that was created in context of an edition of Hypereides speeches. The editor is based on an enhanced TEI standard, employs the Leiden convention set of marks and runs LaTeX/Ledmac in the background to produce its Pdfs, for more information see the article HypereiDoc – an XML based framework supporting cooperative text editions. I haven’t got the time to check this deeper, but it seems that HypereiDoc really serves as a Ledmac editor which is really interesting (a deeper examination will come up soon).