| Wilhelm Nestle | |
| Birth Date: | April 16, 1865 |
| Nationality: | German |
| Occupation: | Philosopher |
Wilhelm Nestle (pronounced as /de/; 16 April 1865, Stuttgart, Kingdom of Württemberg – 18 April 1959, Stuttgart) was a German philologist and philosopher.[1]
Wilhelm Nestle was the only child of High Court Attorney Christian Gottlieb Nestle (died 1879) and Maria Christiane Steudel (died 1889), who had had other children in previous marriages. Following his school years, Nestle studied classical philology, philosophy, and history at the University of Tübingen and at the Humboldt University of Berlin. He was a student, among others, of Alfred von Gutschmid and Erwin Rohde. In 1888 he passed the teacher's exam and in 1889 he obtained his doctorate in Philosophy in Tübingen. Then he entered the school service in Württemberg, frequently changing posts. Among others, he worked in Heilbronn, Tübingen, Stuttgart, Maulbronn and Ulm. There he married Klara Neuffer in 1899 and undertook, in the same year, study trips to Greece and Italy. In 1900, he assumed a post of tutor at Schwäbisch Hall. In that city he published the first of many works: Euripides, der Dichter der griechischen Aufklärung (Euripides, the poet of the Greek Enlightenment), which earned him the call in 1902 as professor at the evangelist theological seminary of Schöntal, where he taught for six years. From 1909 to 1913 he was director of higher studies at the Karlsgymnasium in Stuttgart; from 1913 to 1919 he was rector of the Heilbronner Karlsgymnasiums, after which he returned to the Karlsgymnasium in Stuttgart as third rector. Retired in 1932, he was appointed honorary professor of Greek philosophy at the University of Tübingen. Following the publication of numerous philological writings, in 1940 and 1944 his main works appeared: Vom Mythos zum Logos, die Selbstentfaltung des griechischen Denkens von Homer bis auf die Sophistik und Sokrates (From Mythos to Logos: The Self-development of Greek Thought from Homer to the Sophistics and Socrates) and Griechische Geistesgeschichte von Homer bis Lukian in ihrer Entfaltung vom mythischen zum rationalen Denken dargestellt (History of the Greek Spirit from Homer to Lucian, Presented in its Development from Mythical to Rational Thought). In 1947, the University of Heidelberg awarded him the Kuno Fischer Prize for Vom Mythos zum Logos. On the same date Nestle began to go blind. He died at the age of ninety-four.
One of his sons was the classical philologist Walter Nestle (1902–1945).
The length of Nestle's work is estimated, in the bibliography published by his son in 1965 on the occasion of the centenary of his birth, to be 34 books, 212 articles and tracts for magazines and newspapers as well as 628 reviews. In his posthumous legacy there are undoubtedly many other unpublished manuscripts. The core of his work is configured, beginning with his first work of 1903, with the writings on Greek philosophy, including the publication in 1913, in collaboration with Otto Crusius, of the third volume of the Philologica by Friedrich Nietzsche and a series of fundamental works, such as the four-volume collection Die griechischen Philosophen (The Greek philosophers), the work Griechische Religiosität in ihren Grundzügen und Hauptvertretern (Greek Religiosity in its Characteristic Features and its Main Representatives, in three volumes), as well as a Geschichte der griechischen Literatur (History of Greek literature). His main works, which appeared late in 1940 and 1944, are the aforementioned Vom Mythos zum Logos, die Selbstentfaltung des griechischen Denkens von Homer bis auf die Sophistik und Sokrates and Griechische Geistesgeschichte von Homer bis Lukian in ihrer Entfaltung vom mythischen zum rationalen Denken dargestellt, are the result of his Greek studies conducted over several decades. Some theological writings also belong to his late work, such as Die Krisis des Christentums, ihre Ursache, ihr Werden und ihre Bedeutung (The Crisis of Christianity, its Cause, its Evolution and its Meaning), of 1947. The theologian Josef Hasenfuß summarized the basic thesis of this book as follows: “Today people could no longer be bound to the Christian creed; but they needed the ethics of Jesus to avoid the threat of self-destruction. That is why the only option left for the church is to turn away from dogmatics and turn to the ethical core of Jesus' teaching, to love one's neighbor."[2]