Burkhard Gladigow (8 November 1939 – 16 December 2022) was a German scholar of religious studies and classical philology. He was professor at the University of Tübingen.
Biography Gladigow was born in Berlin on 8 November 1939. He studied classical philology, philosophy and religious studies at the Free University of Berlin. He received his PhD from the University of Tübingen in 1962 with a dissertation on the concepts of sophos and sophia from Homer to Aeschylus. His doctoral supervisor was . Vorwort.
He later became professor of general religious studies and classical philology at the University of Tübingen. His research focused on systematic religious studies, ancient, European and Mediterranean history of religion, the history of science, and the interference of natural science and religion. His contributions to the study of polytheism include the identification of three interdependent aspects in all major debates on the subject since the Renaissance: artistic genius as a compensation for the disenchantment of nature, the idea of polytheism as closer to nature than monotheism, and polytheism as an alternative to the claim of absolute truth.
His doctoral students at Tübingen included Christoph Auffarth and Jörg Rüpke.
In 2021, a collection of essays discussing Gladigow's contribution to the study of religion was published, under the title Religion in Culture – Culture in Religion: Burkhard Gladigow's Contribution to Shifting Paradigms in the Study of Religion. This volume contains a complete bibliography of Gladigow's work.
Gladigow died on 16 December 2022 at the age of 83.
Selected publications
Dissertation
Collection of articles
Edited volumes
Reference work
References