Friedrich August Wolf (German:[vɔlf]; 15 February 1759 – 8 August 1824) was a German classicist who is considered the founder of classical and modern philology.
In 1777, after two years of independent study, at the age of eighteen, Wolf went to the University of Göttingen.[1] Legend has it that he chose to enroll in the department of "philology", despite the fact that the university had none. His enrollment was nonetheless accepted as submitted.[citation needed] At the time Christian Gottlob Heyne was a member of the faculty. Heyne excluded Wolf from his lectures, and criticized Wolf's views on Homer. Wolf was undeterred and pursued his studies through the university's library.[2]
It was in Halle (1783–1807), with the support of ministers serving under Frederick the Great, that Wolf first laid down the principles of the field he would call "Philology".[4] He defined philology as the study of human nature as exhibited in antiquity. Its methods include the examination of the history, writing, art and other examples of ancient cultures. It combines the study of history and language, through interpretation, in which history and linguistics coalesce into an organic whole. This was the ideal of Wolf's philological seminarium at Halle.
The Halle professorship ended after the French invasion of 1806. He relocated to Berlin, where he received assistance from Wilhelm von Humboldt. Later he once more took a professorship, but he no longer taught with his old success, and he wrote very little. His most finished work, the Darstellung der Alterthumswissenschaft, though published
at Berlin (1807), belongs essentially to the Halle time.[3]
Taking medical advice, Wolf travelled to the south but died on the road to Marseille, and was buried there. In 1840 a medal was struck in his honor.[6]
^Friedrich Schleiermacher, "Ueber den Begriff der Hermeneutik mit Bezug auf F. A. Wolfs Andeutungen und Asts Lehrbuch", lecture delivered on 13 August 1829; published in Friedrich Schleiermachers sämtliche Werke III/3, 1838 (Schleiermacher makes reference to Ast's Grundlinien der Grammatik, Hermeneutik und Kritik (1808) and Wolf's Vorlesungen über die Enzyklopädie der Altertumswissenschaft (1831)); Richard E. Palmer, Hermeneutics, Northwestern University Press, 1969, ch. 6.
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Monro, David Binning (1911). "Wolf, Friedrich August". In Chisholm, Hugh (ed.). Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 28 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 770–771.
