F.A. Wolf, la scienza dell’antichità e noi: come possiamo uscire dal XIX secolo?

Wolf’s historical-philological Altertumswissenschaft was an academic knowlegde helpful to the State because of its space and time limits, its methods and rhetoric, his idea of the Ancients as a mirror of modern ideals. The present crisis of this paradigm can be related to State’s decline and to modern globalisation, then to the development of fragmented research fields. This development isolated scholars from society and strengthened the problem of the meaning of studies. We can find a possible meaning of these studies for example: 1) by writing the history of the non-violent fights, 2) by trying the counterfactual history or the countertextual writing, examining the alternatives possibilities to the violence, 3) by comparing us with the Ancients starting from a clear social project. As for philology, this aim could be achieved by computer editions without any difference between text and apparate.