Konrad Gaiser
Konrad Gaiser (26 November 1929 – 3 May 1988) was a German classical philologist and academic, one of the most important interpreters of Plato.
Biography
Konrad Gaiser was born in Gerstetten, Heidenheim. Gaiser spent his school years at the seminaries in Maulbronn and Blaubeuren. After graduating from high school, he studied Greek, Latin, history and philosophy in Tübingen, Basel, Munich and Rome. In 1955, he received his doctorate with the dissertation Protreptics and Parenesis in Plato. He habilitated in 1960 on Plato's unwritten doctrine. As a student of Wolfgang Schadewaldt, Gaiser succeeded him as full professor of classical philology at the University of Tübingen.
In 1970, he took over the Plato Archive founded by Georg Picht and brought it from Hinterzarten to Tübingen. From 1974 until his death, Gaiser was also the First Chairman of the Heidelberg Commission for the Goethe Dictionary and thus held the scientific leadership on behalf of the Commission. He belonged to the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities as a full member since 1974. Since 1984 he was a corresponding member of the Braunschweig Scientific Society.
Konrad Gaiser died unnoticed in a Tübingen clinic at the age of 59 as a result of his second heart attack. He found his final resting place in Tübingen's Bergfriedhof Cemetery.[1]
Research
One of the focal points of Gaiser's research was Plato's unwritten doctrine. The philosopher himself had called his published dialogues a game. His student Aristotle had explicitly claimed that there was an unwritten doctrine besides Plato's published writings. In the second half of the 20th century, this question was the central topic of research on the history of older philosophy. Konrad Gaiser has made a significant effort to reconstruct this unwritten teaching:
Konrad Gaiser, in his 1984 Naples lecture Platone come scrittore filosofico, convincingly argued that the esoteric position he advocated could integrate text-immanent esotericism without contradiction: Plato could, says Gaiser, both exclude certain doctrines from being written down at all and convey certain other insights by means of the indirect mode of communication between the lines only to those of understanding. The author's two choices nowhere come into conflict with each other, but rather complement each other in a meaningful way. And here the superiority of Gaiser's hermeneutical standpoint becomes apparent: he represents the more comprehensive and unprejudiced theory of dialogue, which is neither blind to the advantages of indirect communication pointed out by Schleiermacher nor condemned to throw overboard the extensive historical tradition concerning the oral Plato ...[2]
Works
- Platons ungeschriebene Lehre (1963; 1998)
- Goethe. Bilder aus seinem Leben (1969)
- Das Altertum und jedes neue Gute (1970)
- Gesammelte Schriften (2004; edited by Thomas A. Szlezák)
Notes
- ↑ Flashar, Hellmut (2004). Spectra. Kleine Schriften zu Drama, Philosophie und Antikerezeption. Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, p. 333.
- ↑ Szlezák, Thomas A. (2002). "Friedrich Schleiermacher und das Platonbild des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts," Plato. The Internet Journal of the International Plato Society, Vol. II, VII.
References
- Schmidt, Ernst A. (2012). "Gaiser, Konrad". In: Peter Kuhlmann, Helmuth Schneider, eds., Geschichte der Altertumswissenschaften. Biographisches Lexikon (= Der Neue Pauly. Supplemente. 6). Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler, pp. 439–40.
