Kristine Palmieri (Halle / Chicago)
Critical Thinking and the Philological Foundations of Modern Science in Nineteenth Century Germany
14.07.2022
Ort: Historicum K 026
Zeit: 16-18 Uhr
The meteoric rise of nineteenth-century German science has been well documented. The crucial role that classical philology played in its development, however, has been neglected. This paper contends that the epistemic authority of philology in the nineteenth century was undergirded by the dissemination of a wissenschaftlich ethos, which originated in classical philology seminars and spread through German academia like wildfire. I thus begin by demonstrating the crucial role that philology seminars played in the development of this ethos, focusing especially on the complex of scholarly practices, epistemic virtues, research methods, and pedagogical ideals that the philology seminar instilled in its members. I then chart how and why this ethos permeated intellectual life and academic culture as seminar graduates came to dominate in the upper echelons of Gymnasium teaching. Finally, this paper examines the ways in which the institutional preeminence of classical philology and the proliferation of the seminar model influenced emerging fields by impacting research and teaching at the universities. In so doing, I argue that the entrenchment and dissemination of this ethos 1830 was crucial for the development of the sciences in nineteenth-century Germany. I conclude by reflecting on the extent to which the way of knowing engendered by this wissenschaftlich ethos of the philology seminars prefigured what the American pragmatist John Dewey would later call ‘critical thinking’ and what this might mean for the history of science today.