Leonhard von Spengel

Leonhard Spengel (since 1875 by Spengel, * September 24, 1803 in Munich, † November 8, 1880 ) was a German philologist Classic.

Life

Leonhard Spengel came from a wealthy family and attended until graduation 1821 (today ) Wilhelmsgymnasium Munich, where his teachers Johann Fröhlich and Joseph Kopp encouraged him to study Classical Philology. Even as a high school student visited Spengel the exercises of the Philological Seminary, which was then headed Friedrich Thiersch. The later the University of Munich was at that time still in Landshut. In Thiersch Spengel began in 1821 his regular studies, which he completed in 1823, at the age of not yet twenty years. Upon recommendation of the academic teacher and with the support of a state scholarship Spengel deepened his studies at the University of Leipzig ( with Gottfried Hermann) and in 1825 at the University of Berlin in August Boeckh and Immanuel Bekker. The following year he released the price objective of the Faculty of Arts, which was the rhetorical education in ancient Greece. The prize essay was published in 1828 under the extended title Συναγωγὴ τεχνῶν ( "Collection of the Arts ").

Because of his work Spengel was associate professor of Classical Studies offered at the University of Kiel, which he turned down. He returned in the fall of 1826 returned to Munich and worked as a lecturer at the Munich School. At the same time, the University of Landshut was moved to Munich. There Spengel received his doctorate on March 28 in 1827 and habilitated shortly thereafter. He then worked at the same time at the high school and at the university. In 1830 he was appointed as school teacher, while the second seminar Board at the University. The Bavarian Academy of Sciences elected him in 1835 as an associate in 1841 a full member of their philosophical and historical class.

In October 1841 Spengel accepted a call to the University of Heidelberg as Full Professor of Classical Philology. In 1847 he returned to Munich after he had there received a similar position at the University. After the death of his former teacher and present colleagues Thiersch (1860 ) was Spengel head of the Philological Seminary. 1875, the Bavarian nobility staff, he was awarded, in 1877, he celebrated his golden jubilee doctor. He died on 8 November 1880.

Spengel was in his time one of the best connoisseurs of Greco-Roman rhetoric. He has written many individual studies on the theory and practice of ancient eloquence, also on Greek philosophy (Plato, Aristotle ) and the textual criticism of the Roman Marcus Terentius Varro polymath.

Spengel founded in 1841 in a lecture to the Bavarian Academy of Sciences of the view that the Magna Moralia not originate from Aristotle, but by one of his students. This thesis was initially assumed, however, rejected (among other things by Eduard Zeller, the most important historians of philosophy of the 19th century ), at the beginning of the 20th century by Hans von Arnim. This was followed by a dispute between Arnim and the Berlin Professor Werner Jaeger, who (like many of his students) entered against the authorship of Aristotle. Later came Dirlmeier Franz (1958) and John M. Cooper (1999) for Aristotle's authorship of a.