Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 October 2009
Summary
To bring latent reason to the understanding of its own possibilities and thus to bring to insight the possibility of metaphysics as a true possibility … is the only way to decide whether the telos which was inborn in European humanity at the birth of Greek philosophy – that of humanity which seeks to exist, and is only possible, through philosophical reason … is merely a factual, historical delusion, the accidental acquisition of merely one among many other civilizations and histories, or whether Greek humanity was not rather the first breakthrough to what is essential to humanity as such, its entelechy.
(E. Husserl, Krisis der Europäischen Wissenschaften)Preliminary Notes
When Perrault, Fontenelle, Boileau, and Bayle inaugurated the quarrel between ancients and moderns, the confrontation with the ancients had been a marginal topic confined to literary questions. At the end of the 18th century, over a hundred years afterward, it was becoming a recurrent theme. Often such a confrontation was part and parcel of modern philosophy's self-understanding; it helped define its identity by gauging its proximity and distance from old models. More frequently than in the previous two centuries, which were busy severing their ties with tradition, we find appeals to revitalize ancient philosophy or civilization. But all such appeals say less about the sources to which they refer than about the purpose they served at the time, in the conditions in which they arose, about the historical needs from which they originated.
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- Hegel and Aristotle , pp. 1 - 28Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2001