What is philolgical self-evidence? Perspectives from literary criticism and jurisprudence

• Applicant: Dr. Eva Noller
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies ; German Literary and Cultural Studies (Modern German Literature) ; Greek and Latin Philology ; Principles of Law and Jurisprudence
• Term: from 2020 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 438613222

The DFG-network "What is philological self-evidence? Perspectives from literary criticism and jurisprudence" aims to make self-evidence – an aspect of literary and philological theory and practice that has not yet been sufficiently investigated – useful for the theoretical-methodological discourse of (textual) knowledge in the broader sense. The challenge of any concern with self-evidence lies in its ambiguity. Self-evidence, for example, can be under-stood as the product of a cognitive process, but also as a prerequisite for cognition and judgement; self-evidence has both rational and intuitive traits, it proves something, but at the same time is often itself not completely explainable in its obviousness. Although self-evidence is often called upon as a central instance in processes of knowledge and judgement, there is a lack of approaches that provide a theoretically and methodologically reflected definition of what constitutes self-evidence as a (non) hermeneutic concept and/or category. The DFG-network would like to bridge this gap and show how the concept of self-evidence can be made applicable to other interpretative sciences. Therefore, the project is interdisciplinary, but concentrates on disciplines dealing with the interpretation of texts: Classical Philology, German Studies, Law. The aim is to make similarities and differences in methods and ques-tions when dealing with texts more clearly comprehensible through the different disciplines participating and to be able to shed light on them from both a synchronic and a diachronic perspective. The work focuses on two aspects: 1) A conceptual definition of self-evidence, based on its origin in (ancient) rhetoric; 2) The investigation of self-evidence as a form of knowledge. From the contributions worked out by the individual members, self-evidence should be grasped more clearly not only in its problematics but also in its possibilities for interpretative analysis of texts.

• DFG Programme: Scientific Networks
• Co-Investigator: Dr. József Krupp