Sakontala oder der entscheidende Ring. EinIndishes Schauspiel von Kalidas. Aus den Ursprachen Sanskrit und Prakrit ins Englische und aus diesem ins Deutsche uberestzt mit Erlauterungen von Georg Forster [GERMAN TEXT]

xliv ,264 pp. German translation of Sanskrit play, with commentary. Abhijnānaśākuntalam, also known as Shakuntala, The Recognition of Shakuntala, The Sign of Shakuntala, and many other variants, is a Sanskrit play by the ancient Indian poet Kālidāsa, dramatizing the story of Śakuntalā told in the epic Mahābhārata and regarded as the best of Kālidāsa's works. Its exact date is uncertain, but Kālidāsa is often placed in the 4th century CE. Plots similar to the play appear in earlier texts. There is a story mentioned in the Mahābhārata. A story of similar plot appear in the Buddhist Jātaka tales as well. In the Mahābhārata the story appears as a precursor to the Pāṇḍava and Kaūrava lineages. In the story King Duṣyanta and Śakuntalā meet in the forest and get estranged and ultimately reunited. Their son Bharata is said to have laid the foundation of the dynasty that ultimately led to Kaūravas and Pāṇḍavas. "Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744 - 1803) is a philosopher of the first importance. This judgment largely turns on the intrinsic quality of his ideas (of which this article will try to give some impression). But another aspect of it is his intellectual influence. This has been immense both within philosophy and beyond it (much greater than is usually realized). For example, Hegel's philosophy turns out to be largely a sort of elaborate systematic development of Herder's ideas (especially concerning language, the mind, history, and God); so too does Schleiermacher's (concerning language, interpretation, translation, the mind, art, and God); Nietzsche is deeply influenced by Herder as well (concerning language, the mind, history, and values); so too is Dilthey (especially concerning history); even John Stuart Mill has important debts to Herder (in political philosophy); and beyond philosophy, Goethe was transformed from being merely a clever but rather conventional poet into the great artist he eventually became largely through the early impact on him of Herder's ideas. Indeed, Herder virtually established whole disciplines that we now take for granted. For example, it was mainly Herder (not, as has often been claimed, Hamann) who established fundamental ideas concerning an intimate dependence of thought on language that underpin modern philosophy of language. It was Herder who, through those same ideas, his recognition of deep variations in thought and language across historical periods and cultures, his perception of the fundamental role of grammar in language and of grammar's deep variation between languages, his empirical approach to languages, and in other ways, inspired Friedrich Schlegel, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and others to found modern linguistics. It was Herder who developed modern interpretation-theory, or "hermeneutics", in ways that would subsequently be taken over by Schleiermacher and then more systematically formulated by the latter's pupil August Boeckh. It was Herder who, by doing so, also contributed to establishing the methodological foundations of nineteenth-century German classical scholarship (which rested on the Schleiermacher-Boeckh methodology), and thereby of modern classical scholarship generally. It was Herder who did more than anyone else to establish the general conception and the interpretive methodology of our modern discipline of anthropology. Finally, Herder also made vital contributions to the progress of modern biblical scholarship." - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy