Griechische Wissenschaftstexte: Formen, Funktionen, Differenzierungsgeschichten (review)

For over a century modern scholars or scientists have been judged, and the distinguished ones publicly recognized, for the literary quality of their work. The Roman historian Theodor Mommsen was the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature (1902), and the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung awards the annual Sigmund Freud Prize for scientific prose, not only to scholars in the humanities, but to scientists as well. In light of this established practice of treating scholarly and scientific writing as literature, it seems hard to understand, as Asper states at the beginning of his comprehensive study of Greek scientific texts, that such texts of all periods and languages remained "stepchildren" of literary studies (9). While they have received some attention from a few scholars, e.g., F. Blass, Die Attische Beredsamkeit (2nd ed. 1892), who presented some discoveries about the avoidance of hiatus in Plato and Aristotle (Blass is not cited by Asper), and E. Norden, Die antike Kunstprosa (first published 1898), who included in his treatment of literary prose sections on Plato, Aristotle, Theophrastus, and Epicurus, these authors did not pursue the investigation of scientific texts in a systematic fashion and aimed at the opposite of what Asper attempts since they tried to identify qualities of literary prose in scientific texts, and by doing so blurred the boundaries between scientific texts and other prose literature. Asper, on the other hand, undertakes from the perspective of literary studies to develop a taxonomy of concepts for the analysis and assessment of scientific texts. He identifies various strategies of sharing and safeguarding knowledge in a wide range of selected scientific texts that cover diverse areas such as law, mathematics, medicine, and music, and analyzes them in categories of the history of literature, while disregarding distinctions according to discipline.

In his extended introduction Asper clarifies the subject matter and approach. A distinctive feature of the specific "genre" of scientific texts (of which there existed no theory in antiquity) is that they are nonnarrative; that is, they are not subject to a time structure or tied to specific persons or situations ("de-contextualized"). They are defined foremost by their function and only in a secondary manner by their form, which is dependent on the text's function. The time frame of the texts explored ranges from the Pre-Socratics to Late Antiquity. Asper discerns an increased differentiation over time of adopted forms. He could not, and does not, aspire to cover all scientific texts. There is no chapter on Plato (whose Timaeus was at least understood by later philosophers as a scientific text on the universe), nor, regrettably, on Aristotle's treatises (Asper discusses, however, Met. Δ, 78–81). Here I dare to predict that his sensitivity to form and style would have shattered the still-prevailing view that these treatises are "lecture notes."

In the two main sections of the book, Asper investigates the texts under two rubrics, discrete and continuous texts. Discrete texts are lists whose entries lack syntactical or logical connection and presuppose some sort of preexisting understanding or oral explanation, whereas continuous texts are autonomous and do not rely on an existing consensus between author and recipient.

This book is based on meticulous research. In his treatment of the various categories of scientific texts, Asper does not summarize some sort of scholarly consensus on a particular work, but examines aspects of content, traditional elements, date of composition, genesis of the text, structure, various formal elements, and function of the works under investigation, and he always reaches results that by virtue of the criteria employed advance our understanding. Some of his essays on specific texts (like on the Anonymus Londinensis, 293–304) are masterpieces of analysis; they are concisely written, well organized, and demonstrate good judgment in their conclusions. This study is an impressive piece of scholarship which nobody interested in scientific texts, and not only in classics, can ignore.

In addition to an extensive bibliography, this book has three indices.