In recent years a few scholars have started working on philology from

a summary and critical point of view, questioning the past, present

and future making of philology. Their insights are both historiographical

and epistemological. While the history of philology is

a somewhat traditional issue, the history of its history is very

obviously a recent one. Both still require further consideration. Taken

as a whole or the sum of manifold parts, philology deserves more and

better than simplistic theorizations or far-fetched conceptualizations.

Philology will never stop being practiced as it has been since antiquity,

as an exegetical and grammatical study of the texts it intends to

rebuild, comment upon or explain. What we may call metaphilology,

which takes philology as an object, does not jeopardize the identity,

the means, and the goal of the postulated genuine philology. It mostly

questions its practice from a theoretical point of view, and its scope

as both a historical and epistemological discipline. Any philologist can

be led to reflect critically and problematically on the components, the

borderlines, and also the limits, of a so-called "metaphilology." How

far can we expect to go, and how satisfying or dissatisfying may our

research prove? To what extent can the philological discipline, and its

different subfields, be "metaphilologized"? How serious or arbitrary

does such an inquiry appear? Of what kind is its real purpose or

nature: epistemological, linguistic, historiographical, or maybe even

"ideological"? How far can we reasonably carry on with such research

without betraying philology, the past, ourselves, and the genuineness

of a whole discipline? These are questions the contributors to this

volume try to answer.