Uni-Tübingen

Prof. Dr. Jürgen Leonhardt

Latin / Faculty of Humanities

Currently: Dean of the Faculty of Humanities

 

Contact details

juergen.leonhardtspam prevention@uni-tuebingen.de

Keplerstrasse 2
72074 Tübingen

Tel. +49 7071 29 77964

 

About Ambiguity

It was Aristotle who sparked my interest in ambiguity. There is a famous passage in his Poetics about which scholars have been debating for the last 150 years. The interpretation of this passage depends on whether one treats the expression „the one – the other“ as connected to two previously mentioned concepts in a parallel or in a chiastic manner. Linguistically, Greek and German allow for both possibilities, which induced me to dedicate a monograph to the linguistic parameters as well as the context that is necessary for understanding the passage (Leonhardt 1991).

Based on these analyses, I examine ambiguities in ancient Latin as well as in neo-Latin literature. For a scholar concerned with “distant historical cultures” is it of outmost importance to differentiate between ambiguities that are inherent in an utterance and those that arise through this distance.

 

Biography

After having studied Music and Classical Philology at the universities of Tübingen and Munich, Jürgen Leonhardt completed his dissertation at the University of Munich. The Deutsche Forschungsgesellschaft awarded him a scholarship for his Habilitation, which was submitted in 1994 at the University of Munich. Jürgen Leonhardt was professor for Latin at the University of Rostock (1994-1997) and at the Philipps-Universität Marburg (1997-2004). He has been teaching at Tübingen since 2004. Since 2010, he has been dean of the Faculty of Humanities. He is a member of the Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften and of the Erfurter Akademie der gemeinnützigen Wissenschaften.

 

Research

Jürgen Leonhardt’s main fields of study include classical Latin literature, the impact of Latin language and culture on Europe and Neo-Latin literature. He is especially interested in the philosophy of Rome (with focus on Cicero), in Latin metre, as well as in Latin as lingua franca and academic language from Antiquity to the present.

 

Teaching

Due to his responsibilities as dean of the Faculty of Humanities, Prof. Leonhardt does currently not teach.

 

Further Activities

Together with Anja Wolkenhauer (Tübingen), Manfred Pfisterer (München) and Marc Föcking (Hamburg), Jürgen Leonhardt is editing the Wolfenbütteler Renaissance-Mitteilungen (WRM). This journal is commissioned by the Wolfenbüttel work group for Renaissance studies. Furthermore, Jürgen Leonhardt is member of the editorial board of the Rivista di Cultura Classica e Mediovale, Urbino.

 

Publications

  • Leonhardt, Jürgen (2009-2016). Latein: Geschichte einer Weltsprache. München: Beck 2009, 2nd ed. 2011. (French edition: La grande histoire du latin: Des origines à nos jours. Paris: CNRS Editions 2010., revised and extended English edition: Latin: Story of a World Language, Cambridge/ Massachusetts: Harvard University Press 2013).
  • Leonhardt, Jürgen (2015). "Latein zwischen Klassizität, Geschichte und Gegenwart." Geisteswissenschaften heute. Die Sicht der Fächer. Ed. Dieter Lamping. Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner Verlag. 221-251.
  • Leonhardt, Jürgen (2013). "Humanistisches Weltwissen: Die Lectionum antiquarum libri des Caelius Rhodiginus." Collectors‘ Knowledge: What Is Kept, What Is Discarded. Aufbewahren oder wegwerfen Wie Sammler entscheiden. Eds. Anja Silvia Goeing, Anthony T. Grafton and Paul Michel. Leiden/Boston: Brill. 194-208.
  • Leonhardt, Jürgen (2008). "Classics as Textbooks. A study of the Humanist Lectures on Cicero at the University of Leipzig, ca. 1515." Scholarly Knowledge: Textbooks in Early Modern Europe. Eds. Emidio Campi, Simone De Angelis, Anja-Silvia Goeing and Anthony T. Grafton. Genf: Droz. 89-112.
  • Leonhardt, Jürgen and Barbara Bauer (Eds.) (2000). Triumphus divi Michaelis Archangeli Bavarici (München 1597) – Triumph des heiligen Michael: Einleitung, Text, Übersetzung, Kommentar. Regensburg: Schnell und Steiner.
  • Leonhardt, Jürgen (1999). Ciceros Kritik der Philosophenschulen. München: Beck. (Kap. 1-3 der Habilitationsschrift "Zwischen Tusculanum und Forum. Zwei Studien zur Verbindung von Rhetorik, Philosophie und Politik bei Cicero")
  • Leonhardt, Jürgen (1991). Phalloslied und Dithyrambos. Aristoteles über den Ursprung des griechischen Dramas. Heidelberg: Winter.
  • Leonhardt, Jürgen (1989). Dimensio syllabarum: Studien zur lateinischen Prosodie- und Verslehre von der Spätantike bis zur frühen Renaissance: Mit einem ausführlichen Quellenverzeichnis bis zum Jahr 1600. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht.

 

For a full list of publications, click here.