Prof. Dr. Oliver Primavesi

Website: https://www.klassphil.uni-muenchen.de/personen/professoren/primavesi/index.html

Research Interests:

Greek Philosophy (Presocratics to Aristotle), Ancient Perceptions of Greek Polychrome Sculpture, History of the Transmission of Greek Philosophical Texts, Methodology of Classical Editing

Biography

Oliver Primavesi is Professor of Greek Philology at the LMU Munich, where he has held the Chair of Greek Philology I since 2000. He received his Ph.D. in 1994 with a dissertation on Aristotle's Dialectic and his Habilitation in 1997 on the Strasburg Papyrus of Empedocles, both from the Goethe University Frankfurt, where he was also Reader in Classics from 1990 to 2000. Since 2008, he has been a corresponding member of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities and a member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. He has received several awards, including the Leibniz Prize in 2007 and the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 2010.

Project Abstract

In 1999, Alain Martin (Brussels) and Oliver Primavesi published the first edition of the Strasburg Papyrus of the Pre-Platonic Greek Philosopher Empedocles of Agrigentum/Sicily (P. Strasb. inv. 1665/1666). 25 years later, i.e. in the academic year 2023/24, Oliver Primavesi used a research stay in Berlin as a fellow of the Einstein Centre Chronoi in order to start working on yet another fragment of that ancient Empedocles Papyrus, again in close collaboration with Alain Martin. Whereas the focus of the Strasbourg fragment is on the Empedoclean theory of principles and on his cosmology, the new Papyrus, identified 2022 in Cairo by Nathan Carlig (Liège), deals with his theory of sense perception, attested only indirectly up to now. During an additional one-month research stay as a Chronoi-fellow in February/March 2025, Primavesi will bring the edition of the Cairo fragment to a close. He will put particular emphasis on the explication of the methodological problems raised by such a fragment.