Is philology really obsolete

The domination of structuralism in linguistics and in other humanities and social sciences during XX century has led to the suppression of philology. The focus of academic research on the linguistic system and the exclusion of the semantic and communicational function of the language, i.e. the text, has proven itself inadequate in answering our need to understand the modern world. Philology is re-actualized as a neophilology which takes into account all theoretical insights of structural linguistics, but also renews the complex analytic approach to the text and again confirms itself as an irreplaceable study of man. The programs of modern university education, including those built on the basis of so called Bologna Declaration, implicitly confirm this tendency. Using the example of the metamorphosis of oriental philology as an interdisciplinary academic field at the Faculty of Philology in Belgrade it is shown how disintegration and fragmentation of a classical philological discipline represent a cyclic move towards a new program complexity. Syllabi of modern studies are, in fact and in essence, neophilologically designed, even though the mention of philology is, by order of academic correctness, avoided.