Harold F. Cherniss
Harold Fredrik Cherniss (March 11, 1904 – June 18, 1987) was an American classical scholar. He was an expert on the philosophy of Ancient Greece. He wrote several books in the field, and edited and translated works by Plutarch.
Life
Cherniss was born in St. Joseph, Missouri, and received his doctorate at University of California, Berkeley in 1930. He then taught the Greek language at Cornell University, followed by stints at Johns Hopkins University and the University of California.
He worked in military intelligence for the United States Army during World War II, then was a faculty member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey from 1948 until his death in 1987.
Work
H. Cherniss, in the words of Leon Golden in 1963, dealt substantially "with the universality and humanistic value of Classical studies and with the breadth of world view that is needed by the Classical scholar if he is to be an honest and effective interpreter of his subject."[1] A representative statement of his position on historicism and Classicism was presented to the University of California by him in the following words, "So we are brought back to the texts themselves. If, then, we can never appreciate them as the original audience did and if, again, the reconstruction of the author's biography cannot lead us to understand them, are we to say that true understanding of a work of art is impossible? Consider first, for a moment, what reason there could be for studying a work which had no meaning except for a single audience in a single spot at a single moment in the past! The historian interested in the nature of that audience might use such a work, but only as a means of understanding the audience and without concern for the work itself. Only a madman would even wish to transmute himself into a member of that audience in order to appreciate what could have no meaning for men at any other time or place."[2]
Publications
Books
- The Platonism of Gregory of Nyssa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1930).
- Aristotle's Criticism of Presocratic Philosophy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1935; reprint: New York: Octagon Books, 1964).
- Aristotle's Criticism of Plato and the Academy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1944).
- The Riddle of the Early Academy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1945).
- Selected Papers (Leiden: Brill, 1977).
Articles
- "The Philosophical Economy of the Theory of Ideas", American Journal of Philology 57 (1936): 445–456.
- "Plato as Mathematician", Review of Metaphysics, 4 (1951): 395-425.
- "The Characteristics and Effects of Presocratic Philosophy", Journal of the History of Ideas 12 (1951): 319-345.
Translations
- Plutarch's Moralia, Vol. 12. (with W. C. Helmbold) (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957).
- Plutarch's Moralia, Vol. 13 Part 2. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976).
Notes
- ↑ Golden, Leon (1963). In Praise of Prometheus, p. 28.
- ↑ Cherniss, H. "The Biographical Fashion in Literary Criticism," University of California Publications in Classical Publications in Classical Philology, XII (1933–44), pp. 289ff.
References
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