But I’m not sure whether helpful to ignore an even earlier tradition of very important Dutch and English Greek scholarship (that didn’t end in the same place)
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Dutch (and to some extent, French) classicists became obsessed with reconstructing authentic Hellenistic philosophical texts
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However, the desire to prove these schools were relevant/true started to get in the way of actual scholarship (virtue of later German work was patience and curiosity)
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The English had some phenomenal philological talent c. 1550-1700; but most of it went into theology and related metaphysical issues: esp. revival of neoplatonism
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Far from being an obscure waste of time, neoplatonism was the basis for a century of English intellectual dominance in physics, psychology, and aesthetics
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Locke and Newton were not exactly neo-platonists in this sense... but all their major supporters were
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Locke’s ideal of a perfect classical education was apparently tried twice. The second time = JS Mill. The first time, the result was far grislier
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Loose conjecture: Britain’s strictly linguistic talent was increasingly absorbed by the possibilities of Sanskrit
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The bullying of the Church of England by a 17th c baptist-papist alliance left a shell in the 18th c, and so a diminished audience for Greek/Latin works
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(remember, success of German Gymnasium model *impossible* w/o careers in church for large minority of graduates)
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Nietzsche, Hölderlin both started out destined for the ministry - no way that would have led to Greek fluency in teens in UK (tho c. 1600 it could have - it did for Hobbes)
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One of the stated goals of Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy was to awaken the Hellenic spirit of tragedy within the German people.
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I remember something from Uncle Wolf's 1925 bestseller My Struggle. He speaks of Ancient Greece: "And here we must lift our gaze from our own people to the wider Aryan family." For those who say he despised non-Germans. There's more of this.
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