David Bloch was awarded the Nils Klim Prize in 2009. His acceptance speech from the award ceremony is published here in full.
The award ceremony for the 2009 Holberg Prize and Nils Klim Prize took place in Haakon’s Hall in Bergen, on 25 November, 2009.
The Acceptance Speech
Your Royal Highness, Minister, Your Excellency, Holberg and Niels Klim Committees, ladies and gentlemen. I am honoured and humbled by the fact that I have been awarded a prize of this magnitude and prestige, and I thank the Nils Klim Prize Academic Committee for choosing me among the many excellent young scholars found in the Nordic countries today.
I am also proud to see that the prize has been awarded as a result of the broad scope of my research. Originally, it was Greco-Roman Antiquity that fascinated me and made me study Greek and Latin. But I soon came to realize that these are also the tools which allow studies in the entire western philosophical and intellectual tradition. Such studies in the “historical unity of the European mind”, as the Nils Klim Prize Academic Committee puts it, have been the subject of all my research, and it is, of course, a great pleasure for me to see the importance of this field of research acknowledged.
As most of you will know, Niels Klim’s Subterranean Journey is a wonderful and fantastic story about the discovery of new things, or better: the discovery of new worlds. The discoverer, our hero Niels Klim, often stubbornly clings to his own views and ideas, and he is generally very quick to pass judgment on views that differ from his own. So, if these were his only characteristics, he would, I suppose, be a rather poor scholar. But they are not. For Klim is certainly also capable of true scholarship: once he has pronounced his first verdict on a given topic, he returns to the data once again for a more careful analysis. And quite often he then realizes that his first conclusion was wrong, and he is not afraid to admit it.
I cannot think of a more suitable occasion for admitting that I may not always be very different from Niels Klim — and that I am, to some extent, proud of it.
Thank you.
Dr. David Bloch
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David Bloch
David Blochs (b. 1975) is a Danish philologist and researcher at the Saxo Insititute at Copenhagen University.
