[Note: There is now an updated version of this part of the genealogy.]
I have always been very interested in the intellectual history of the field(s) I am working in. This includes academic genealogy, tracing the line of academic descent through advising relationships back to the mists of time. Some weeks ago, I was reminded of the existence of some relevant crowd-sourced projects on this topic: our student mitcho tweeted on the subject and Peter Lasersohn announced that he had filled in his part of the genealogy all the way back to Peter of Spain, John Duns Scotus, and William of Ockham (and beyond).
Clearly, I couldn’t be outdone like that, so off I went. What I discovered, to my pleasure, was that my tree is rife with classical philologists, which if you know me, is quite appropriate.
This research was made feasible by the wonders of the web, especially the digitization project of Google and the digital archives of the Bavarian State Library in Munich. I can’t say how awesome it is to have such easy access to intellectual history nowadays.
What follows is a summary of what I have found. This may be tedious for anyone but me. Maybe Angelika and maybe my advisees will find this interesting. In any case, I myself find this all endlessly fascinating. I know: what a nerd! So, here goes. I will break it up into several posts so that they don’t get too long.
Part 1: Kratzer - Egli - Theiler - von der Mühll - Schwartz
I received my PhD from UMass in 1994 with a dissertation called “Restrictions on Quantifier Domains”. I started teaching at MIT in 1993 and was finishing my dissertation during my first year of teaching here.
My dissertation advisor (Doktormutter, “doctor mother”) was Angelika Kratzer. There were other very strong influences, of course, chief among them Barbara Partee, but for the purposes of the tree I will go by formal dissertation advisor relationships where possible.
There are many ways in which Angelika was the perfect doctor mother for me. But one aspect I want to highlight here is that just like me, she has a passion for the history of our field. Her dissertation abounds in historical connections, one of which that struck me early on was the emphasis on the contributions of John Wallis [If you’re interested in lightweight reading, Wallis appears as a character in the novel “An Instance of the Fingerpost”]. This kind of historiographic interest was something I just soaked up. One of my early encounters with semantics, in fact, was a seminar taught by Professor Schepers of the Leibniz Research Institute in Münster on medieval semantics (William of Sherwood, William of Ockham, etc.) and other classes like that. For example, I learned to read Aristotle in the original and wrote one of my first college-level term papers on the notions of contradiction and contrariety in Peri Hermeneias (using not just the original but also medieval Arabic commentaries thereon).
Angelika wrote her dissertation entitled “Semantik der Rede: Kontexttheorie Modalwörter Konditionalsätze” (doi:2027/mdp.39015015396008) in 1978. Her official advisor at the University of Konstanz in Germany was Urs Egli.
Urs Egli wrote a 1967 dissertation entitled “Zur stoischen Dialektik” at the University of Bern (Switzerland) under the direction of Willy Theiler. This information was a bit hard to find. I obtained an interlibrary loan copy of Egli’s dissertation and there is a page with a statement from Dekan (Dean) Prof. Dr. E. Walder that the dissertation had been accepted by the philosophical-historical faculty of the University of Bern at the request of Herr Prof. Dr. W. Theiler.
A striking (mostly unsurprising) thing to see in Egli’s acknowledgments is that in his long list of professors whose lectures and seminars he attended, there is not a single woman. In fact, Angelika is not just the only woman in my entire tree, but there is no other woman to even be mentioned in the intellectual biographies of any of these men. Our community has come a long way when I can honestly say that the four most important people in my immediate academic background are Angelika, Barbara, Irene, and Sabine.
Theiler’s dissertation “Zur Geschichte der teleologischen Naturbetrachtung bis auf Aristoteles” was written at the University of Basel (also Switzerland) in 1924 under the direction of Peter von der Mühll. A later edition is in fact dedicated to von der Mühll. Even though there were 43 years between Theiler’s dissertation and Egli’s dissertation, Egli writes in his acknowledgments that von der Mühll had helped him with some information about manuscript transmission.
With von der Mühll, the tree leaves Switzerland; he was Swiss and taught at Zürich and Basel, but he got his doctorate in Göttingen (Germany) in 1909 with a dissertation entitled “De Aristotelis Ethicorum Eudemiorum auctoritate”. From now on in the tree, all dissertations were written in Latin. This one is a mere 47 pages long and it has a DOI: 2027/uc1.b2619343. Unfortunately, Google’s scan of the last page of the dissertation, which has a Vita including acknowledgments, is a bad scan cutting off the right side of the text, so it’s not really useful, except that one can see that he acknowledges Wackernagel among others. His doctor father was Eduard Schwartz.
Eduard Schwartz was mainly trained at the University of Bonn (when I lived in Cologne and regularly visited Bonn, the Intercity trains used to announce that Bonn was the birth place of the composer Ludwig van Beethoven and the capital of the Federal Republic of Germany in that order). He received his doctorate there with a dissertation entitled “De Dionysio Scytobrachione” (freely downloadable as a pdf from Google Books) in 1880. His co-advisors were Franz Bücheler and Hermann Usener. His dissertation has a list of 11 controversial theses at the end (a feature you can still see in linguistics dissertations from the Netherlands, and which recurs in the dissertations further up the tree).
[To be continued]