Is philology relevant?

Authors

• Einar Thomassen University of Bergen

DOI: https://doi.org/10.30674/scripta.67257

Keywords:

Philology, Linguistics, Language and religion, Methodology, Hermeneutics, Criticism, Textual, Humanities

Abstract

The human sciences today all still exist as the effect of the breakup of the philological paradigm. The gains and losses of their emancipation from this paradigm can be discussed for each of them separately, but that will not be done here, for obvious reasons. Anyhow, as far as the history of religions is concerned, the philological paradigm continued to maintain itself more strongly than in other disciplines.  One major reason is that language and texts are generally conceived as playing a very great role in the study of religion. Religious ideas and sentiments are probably more difficult to translate than any other part of a culture, so in order to understand a religion from the agents' point of view you must get into their language.