The Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at Kings College

London and the LMU in Munich, online at www.

History of Philosophy.net.

Today's episode, Down to the Ground, Maista Eckhart.

As we saw a few episodes back, Mark Twain was distinctly unimpressed by what he called the awful German language.

His essay of that title concludes with proposals for reform and failing that,

the suggestion that German, ought to be gently and reverently set aside among the dead languages

for only the dead have time to learn it.

If you've ever tried to render the different pronunciations of the verbs push and print in German, druthen and

druthen, while a native speaker repeatedly tells you that you're doing it wrong, you will

probably sympathize with Twain. In comparison, Latin is a beautiful will probably

in comparison Latin is a beautifully logical and rational language whose structures map on perfectly to the nature of reality itself

at least according to the medieval speculative grammarians.

Yet it was still a major advance when philosophers who were rough contemporaries of those grammarians

began writing in German.

Among them, the most famous is Maista Eckhart.

Of course, Eckhart is not our first encounter with medieval philosophy in vernacular languages.

We know that Marguerite wrote in French and Dante in Italian

at the beginning of the 14th century, and earlier still there were the contributions of the

so-called Beggine mystics with Mechtil of Magdeburg, already writing in German.

Yet no other figure represents the interaction of Latin and vernacular culture as well as

Eckhut. Unlike Dante, Mechtild and Marguerite Poet,

...