Egil A. Wyller

Egil A. Wyller 2009

Egil Anders Wyller (born April 24, 1925 ) is a professor emeritus of ancient intellectual history at the University of Oslo and a member of the Norwegian Academy of Sciences . He is internationally known as an important Plato researcher and proponent of a Platonic-inspired unity of thinking ( Henology ). He has received numerous honors for his scientific achievements.

Origin and family life

Egil A. Wyller comes from an agnostically oriented family. He grew up on the west coast of Norway in Stavanger , where he also attended science high school. His father Trygve Wyller, who worked there as a lawyer and publicist, had resisted the National Socialist occupation forces with pamphlets, which is why he was arrested in December 1941 and later interned in the Sachsenhausen , Natzweiler and Mauthausen concentration camps . In his father's library, Wyller discovered the works of Plato, with which he already dealt intensively as a schoolboy. In 1941 the parental home in Stavanger was confiscated by the German military. The family therefore had to move to a small country house by a fjord in Skiftun, Hjelmeland municipality . In 1945 Trygve Wyller was liberated by the Americans and returned to his family. Egil had already met his future wife Eva Middelthon at school, whom he married in 1949. The father died in 1960. The youngest son of Egil A. Wyller's three children had an accident in 1980.

Scientific way

Egil A. Wyller first studied Classical Philology , in particular Graecistics , general history of ideas and ancient intellectual history in Oslo . He completed his master's degree in 1953. His further research on Plato led him to the University of Tübingen to study Wolfgang Schadewaldt and to the University of Freiburg to study with Hermann Gundert . He met Martin Heidegger personally in Freiburg im Breisgau .

Wyller completed his habilitation on the Henology of Parmenides Dialogue . The Oslo post-doctoral thesis Platons Parmenides was published in 1960. In this, Wyller introduces the doctrine of the beautiful in the symposium and the doctrine of the good in the politeia . The focus of the research is on the theme of the one and the other in Parmenides . Research on Nikolaus von Kues led Wyller to Josef Koch at the University of Cologne in 1962 . At the invitation of Wolfgang Schadewaldt, with whom he then became friends, he gave lectures in Tübingen in 1965 , from which the book Der late Plato emerged . In 1967 he was appointed full professor at the University of Oslo.

In his main work, Unity and otherness , which first appeared in Norway in 1981, Wyller developed the discipline of henology both historically and systematically. In it, henology is presented as a dialectical relationship between unity and otherness. In addition to Plato's dialogue Parmenides , in the historical part of the work he also examines the teachings of Nikolaus von Kues , Kant and Fichte, among other things . In two systematic parts, an independent doctrine of principles with emphasis on the dialectic of unity and otherness is then developed ( “universal systematics” ) and finally, in an “individual systematics”, the relationship between God, the world and man is examined based on biblical revelation.

After that, Wyller devoted himself in numerous publications to the history of Henology and Platonism in antiquity and in the Middle Ages. In literary studies he has also dealt intensively with Goethe and Ibsen , but also with the Norwegian poets Henrik Wergeland and Olaf Bull . Wyller translated several dialogues of Plato into Norwegian and wrote numerous philosophical-theological essays in his mother tongue and edited works that make up a twenty-volume henological series. In 1995 he retired.

Honors and memberships

• Founding member and first chairman of the Scandinavian Plato Society in Copenhagen
• Member of the Norwegian Academy of Sciences
• International member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences
• Commander of the Greek Order of the Phoenix
• Knight 1st class of the Norwegian Order of Saint Olav 2000

Publications

• Plato's Parmenides in its connection with Symposium and Politeia: Interpretations of Platonic Henology. Aschehoug, Oslo 1960; Reprint Königshausen and Neumann, Würzburg 2006
• The late Plato: Tübingen Lectures 1965 . Meiner, Hamburg 1970
• Henology . In: Joachim Ritter u. a. (Ed.): Historical dictionary of philosophy . Volume 3, Schwabe, Basel 1974, Sp. 1059 f.
• Henological Perspectives I: Plato - Johannes - Cusanus . Rodopi, Amsterdam 1995
• Henological Perspectives II: Symposium in honor of Egil A. Wyller , ed. by Tore Frost. Rodopi, Amsterdam 1997
• Plato / Platonism . I: Plato. II. Platonism . In: Theologische Realenzyklopädie , Vol. 26, de Gruyter, Berlin 1996, pp. 677-702
• Unity and otherness: a historical and systematic study of henology. Königshausen and Neumann, Würzburg 2003
• Yesterday and tomorrow - today: henological essays on European intellectual history. Königshausen and Neumann, Würzburg 2005
• Platonism / Henology in Antiquity and in the Middle Ages. Bilingual textbook I - II . Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2014
  • Vol. 1: Antiquity and the Latin Middle Ages , ISBN 978-3-8260-5163-0
  • Vol. 2: The Greek-Byzantine tradition against a late antique background , ISBN 978-3-8260-5164-7

Web links

• Literature by and about Egil A. Wyller in the catalog of the German National Library