Concept
Max Müller
Overview
Friedrich Max Müller (German: [ˈfʁiːdʁɪç ˈmaks ˈmʏlɐ]; 6 December 1823 – 28 October 1900) was a German-born British comparative philologist and Orientalist. He was one of the founders of the Western academic disciplines of Indology and religious studies. Müller wrote both scholarly and popular works on the subject of Indology. He directed the preparation of the Sacred Books of the East, a 50-volume set of English translations which continued after his death. He was also the first major scholar to compile the Rigveda Samhita along with the Sāyanācarya commentary, in six volumes entitled Rig-Veda-Sanhita, The Sacred Hymns Of The Brahmans.
Müller became a professor at Oxford University, first of modern languages, then of comparative philology in a position founded for him, and which he held for the rest of his life. Early in his career he held strong views on India, believing that it needed to be transformed by Christianity. Later, his view became more nuanced, championing ancient Sanskrit literature and India more generally. He became involved in several controversies during his career: he was accused of being anti-Christian; he disagreed with Darwinian evolution, favouring theistic evolution; he raised interest in Aryan culture, opposing the racial misuse of the term ‘Aryan’, which later developed into the racist Aryan ideology of the 20th century; and he promoted the idea of a 'Turanian' family of languages.
Among his honours and distinctions, he was made an associé étranger of the French Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres; he was awarded the Bavarian Maximilian Order for Science and Art; and he was made a member of the Privy Council of the United Kingdom.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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Footnote 8: Max Müller’s translation. “I call an extensive quantity that in which the representation of the whole is rendered possible by the representation of its parts, _and therefore necessarily preceded by it_.[9] I cannot represent to myself any line,…
Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the modern world
States what Max Müller is; opens on Max Müller.
Immediately afterward, however, Prof. Max Müller, having given as examples of abstract nouns, "day and night, spring and winter, dawn and twilight, storm and thunder," goes on to argue that, "as long as people thought in language, it was simply impossible to speak of morning or evening, of spring and winter, without giving to these conceptions something of an individual, active, sexual, and at last, personal…
Herbert Spencer, Essays
Names Max Müller twice; opens on Max Müller.
Thus the believer, like the delirious man, lives in a world peopled with beings and things which have only a verbal existence. Max Müller himself recognized this, for he regarded myths as the product of a disease of the intellect. At first, he attributed them to a disease of language, but since language and the intellect are inseparable for him, what is true of the one is true of the other. "When trying to explain…
Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life
Names Max Müller.
Philosophers who discussed Max Müller
- Paul Deussen
- James Mill
- Adi Shankara
- Sanskrit
- Mou Tsung-san
- Buddhism
- Baruch Spinoza
- Swami Vivekananda
- Maitreyi
Related ideas
- Matthew Arnold
- Persian language
- Hinduism
- Indology
- Abrahamic religions
- Henotheism
- Immanuel Kant
- Ancient Greek
- Indo-European languages
- Vedas
- Helena Blavatsky
- Internet Archive
- Latin
- Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling
- Sahitya Akademi
- Leipzig
- Hermeticism
- Natural religion
- Perennial philosophy
- Ottoman Empire
- Vedanta
- Paganism
- Sri Aurobindo
- Classical antiquity
Opposing perspectives
Place in the tradition
Part of Buddhist modernism.