Herman Paul

Climate change does not seem to have been a topic of great concern to Hayden White. In his published writings, at least, he only sporadically alludes to it, associating it with slow changes in the realm of Fernand Braudel's histoire de longue durée more than with catastrophes of the kind that figure so prominently in his later essays. I would like to suggest that there is, nonetheless, a way in which White's work can be productively brought to bear on climate change or, more specifically, on how human beings make sense of climate change by crafting narratives about it.

Why did Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann's The Social Construction of Reality (1966), despite its landmark impact on fields across the humanities and social sciences, never resonate much among historians and historical theorists? One answer is that the historical profession did not need Berger and Luckmann to be told that traditions can be invented or that nation states resort to myths to create symbolic identities for their peoples. The field had its own Bergers and Luckmanns, for instance in the person of Hayden White.

Philosophers often talk about a “revival” or “return” of virtue ethics, prompted by the work of Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, and Alasdair MacIntyre. Behind these metaphors lies a three-stage narrative, according to which virtue ethics once reigned supreme, then fell from grace, and is now being restored to prominence. This article examines the plausibility of this narrative in the light of relevant historical scholarship. To that end, it surveys three bodies of literature: (1) studies on the history of virtue ethics, which are mostly concerned with the question of to what extent Aristotle, Hume, Nietzsche, and others can be classified as virtue ethicists avant la lettre; (2) studies on the history of virtue theories, which cast their net a little broader by drawing attention to thinkers who have interesting things to say about virtue without necessarily qualifying as virtue ethicists; and (3) studies on the history of virtue discourses, focused on first-order uses of virtue language by thinkers engaged in normative ethics rather than in second-order theorizing. Judging by this literature, the “standard narrative” with its three-stage plot structure of grandeur, decline, and revival has some significant limitations.p

This article traces the history of a scholarly vice of little renown: hypercriticism. Focusing on classical philologists and biblical scholars in nineteenth-century Germany, it examines how Hyperkritik developed from a technical philological term into a pejorative label that was widely invoked to discredit the latest trends in classical philology and, especially, biblical scholarship. Methodologically, this broad use of the term challenges historians' preference for treating scholarly virtues and vices as norms tied to scholars' research practices. The article therefore develops a rhetorical approach, complementary to the praxeological one, in which scholarly vice terms are interpreted as parts of a repertoire of scholarly "don'ts" on which both specialists and nonspecialists could draw in addressing the perceived ills of scholarly work.

In hoeverre lijkt de pedant op de charlatan? Beide duiken al eeuwenlang op in allerlei satires en serieuze verhandelingen over de vitia sive errores eruditorum (ondeugden en gebreken van de geleerden). Vaak wordt de pedant geportretteerd als een figuur wiens deugden geen maat houden – hij is té geleerd, té zeer overtuigd van eigen gelijk –, terwijl de charlatan een ordinaire bedrieger is, geheel verstoken van deugd. Maar houdt dit onderscheid historisch stand? Fungeren de pedant en de charlatan niet net als de sofist en de broodgeleerde als zinnebeelden waarop iedere generatie haar eigen fouten en gebreken projecteert? Geldt überhaupt niet voor wetenschappelijke deugden en ondeugden – de goede en minder goede eigenschappen van geleerden – dat zowel hun betekenis als hun relatieve belang voortdurend verandert? Maar als er zoveel in beweging is, waarom zijn de pedant en de charlatan dan toch zulke hardnekkige figuren?

Hardly had Leopold von Ranke died in May 1886 when one of his former assistants, Theodor Wiedemann, received a letter from a fellow historian with the following request: “Please give me a description of the method of work. Did v. Ranke dictate all his work? How many hours a day could he work?” Wiedemann’s reply came in the form of a long series of articles, which described Ranke’s work habits in fascinating detail. Interestingly, Wiedemann was not alone in penning such a memoir. Other colleagues and acquaintances of Ranke also published detailed descriptions of his legendary work ethic. Drawing on this late nineteenth-century material, this chapter tries to explain why Ranke’s contemporaries were so impressed by the productivity and appetite for work that Germany’s most famous historian had displayed, even in his old age. How widely shared were the virtues of work attributed to Ranke? Did his admirers interpret his demanding work rhythm as a model for imitation or, alternatively, as an achievement unattainable by ordinary mortals? Also, did Ranke’s motto, labor ipse voluptas (“the joy lies in the work itself”), resonate among German scholars in the 1880s because it captured their own understanding of work?

What are the humanities? As essentialist answers to this question are losing credibility, historians may help elucidate what the humanities are by offering genealogical accounts of how the ideals, practices, and institutions currently known as the humanities have come into being. This article points out why such a genealogical project is important and how it might serve as a collective aspiration for the emerging field of the history of the humanities. Specifically, the paper describes the project as driven by a commitment to unraveling multilayered legacies and path-dependent trajectories. Instead of offering unifying accounts, genealogists are attentive to diversity, disagreement, and change over time. Consequently, genealogies are well-suited to explain why the humanities are made up of sometimes contradictory ideas and practices, while looking differently in Cairo or Buenos Aires than in Paris or New York.

How can historians of the humanities do justice to the historical complexities of their subject matter while at the same time providing valuable input to current debates about the future of the humanities? This essay argues that a history of critical thinking, focused on the characteristics of a ‘critical thinker’, may meet both requirements. Drawing on case studies from the nineteenth century to the present, the article shows that critical thinking can take on a variety of forms, each of which makes different demands on the self. In most cases, critical thinking not only requires skills or virtues, but also normative attitudes (identifications, dissociations) and a certain ‘transformative capacity’. If such conceptual distinctions help historians understand what critical thinking meant in the past, they are equally applicable to the twenty-first century. The article therefore suggests that historians of the humanities may enrich current debates by showing that the tendency of reducing critical thinking to a set of easily learnable skills finds little support in the history of critical thinking. Moreover, if historical research shows that critical thinking has always been a contested ideal, historians may raise the question what politics or visions of a desirable future critical thinking supports or suppresses.

What Napoleon Bonaparte and postmodernism have in common, a Marxist film critic once quipped, is that they ruled their empires through a throng of loyal relatives. Like the French emperor, who appointed siblings to thrones across Europe, postmodernism conquered the humanities with help of various “discursive uncles, brothers-in-law, and cousins,” such as post-capitalism, post-Marxism, post-feminism, and post-theory. Clearly, this Napoleonic analogy, with its depiction of postmodernism as a foreign invader, conveyed a sense of unease about the rise to popularity of “post-concepts” (post-ideology, poststructuralism, postcolonialism) in the late twentieth-century humanities. In addition, however, the analogy hints at something of historical interest: intellectual affinities or even kinship relations between post-terms that entered academic parlance with so much force that already by the late 1980s, several commentators had the impression that they were living in an “era of posts.” This raises some intriguing questions: Where did post-concepts like postmodernism come from? What made them so irresistible that scholars could not stop inventing new ones, from post-political and post-traditional to post-racist and post-sexual? What kind of aspirations did the prefix express? And if it is true, as this chapter will argue, that “post” was malleable enough to denote a range of different things – intellectual debt and independency, individual self-fashioning and broad societal change, progress and regression – what was the point of bringing all this together under a single heading? This chapter explores these questions through a recent case study: the rise of “post-criticism” as a rallying cry in, most notably, the field of literary studies.

What were the constellations of virtues cherished by late nineteenth-century German humanities scholars? What catalogs of virtues did they instill in their students and display in their research and writing? Drawing on the case of the Kaiser-Wilhelms-Universität in Strasbourg, I will give an answer in two parts. In the first half of the chapter, I will argue that the dominance of philological and historical critique was such that virtues of criticism (accuracy, precision, attention to detail) were central to Strasbourg’s academic ethos in the period under discussion, from 1872 to the turn of the century. In this context, I take the term “ethos” to refer to habits, expectations, norms, and values that scholars at the time believed to define good scholarship. Yet while virtues of criticism were held in high regard, to the point of being seen as indispensable for each and every serious attempt at scholarly inquiry, the ethos at Strasbourg allowed for more than philological precision or historical accuracy. In writing books for general readers, for instance, humanities scholars also engaged in activities that required other qualities than carefulness and sharp-mindedness. So, in the second half of the chapter, I will offer three qualifications to the importance of virtues of criticism: (1) not all genres to which Strasbourg scholars contributed made an equally strong demand on virtues of criticism; (2) these virtues of criticism were compatible with different scholarly personae, or models of being of scholar; and (3) more often than not, they were colored by evaluative stances vis-à-vis the German past, the Christian tradition, or the non-European “other.”

In 2016, the opening issue of the journal History of Humanities proudly announced that a new field of research was in the process of emerging. Although humanities scholars had always engaged with the histories of their own disciplines, what was new and exciting, according to the journal editors, was that they had begun to broaden their horizons. If humanities scholars had been used to studying the history of French linguistics or Chinese historiography in relative isolation from other fields, they now began to raise comparative questions. How had Fernand de Saussure’s structuralism resonated in disciplines other than linguistics? To what extent had source critical methods been adopted across the humanities? And how is it to be explained that some humanities fields have been more receptive to postcolonial critique than others? The history of the humanities as envisioned by the journal editors thus appears as something more than an umbrella term for the history of linguistics, the history of historiography, and the history of art history. Typical for the field is its “ambition to write comparative historiographies of the humanities.” Historians of the humanities are scholars traversing across fields, through all of the humanities (and beyond), with the aim of understanding what the humanities have been, what they are today, and why they are important.

To what extent can the émigré historian be considered a scholarly persona? That is to say, to what degree can émigré historians, living and working in hybrid spaces in between cultures, be regarded as specimen of a distinct type of historian, different from others, characterized by habits or working manners of which we can say: these are typical of émigré historians? Although the question has seldom been raised in this particular form, the sheer amount of studies devoted to, for instance, German émigré historians in the United States suggests that there is something special about émigrés which makes them more interesting objects of study than, say, historians who spent their entire careers in stable cultural contexts. Already in the 1920s, the American sociologist Robert E. Park commented on this special aura of the émigré, whom he described as “a man living and sharing intimately in the cultural life and traditions of two distinct peoples,” “a man on the margins of two cultures and two societies,” navigating between the not always reconcilable demands of his “old self and the new.”  Even if Park’s gendered language bears the marks of its time, his fascination for cultural hybridity has clearly endured, also among historians of historiography. Yet few of them have straightforwardly raised the question with which I started: To what extent can the émigré historian be considered a scholarly persona?

History was a key discipline in what the German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey called the 'human sciences' (Geisteswissenschaften). Focusing on the German lands, this chapter surveys what the study of history looked like in the decades prior to the publication of Dilthey's Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften (Introduction to the Human Sciences, 1883). It does so, somewhat unconventionally, by zooming in on Hartwig Floto (1825-1881), a largely forgotten pupil of the famous Leopold von Ranke. Apart from the fact that this biographical angle adds color and flavor to an otherwise too abstract story, Floto's life and work lend themselves well for discussion of both familiar and not-yet-familiar themes in the history of the humanities: Ranke's historical exercises, historians' middle-class backgrounds, research institutions like the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, but also historians' personae as typically described in terms of virtues and vices. This chapter therefore aims to do two things at once: it offers an accessible introduction to nineteenth-century German historical studies, and it also seeks to showcase both older and newer lines of research in the history of the humanities.

In the past two decades, individual explanations of scientific misconduct ('bad apples') have increasingly given way to systemic explanations ('bad systems'). Where did this interest in systemic factors (publication pressure, competition for research funding) come from? Given that research ethicists often present their interventions as responses to scientific misconduct, this article tests the hypothesis that these systemic explanations were triggered by high-visibility cases of scientific norm violation. It does so by examining why Dutch scientists in 2011 explained Diederik Stapel's grand-scale data fabrication largely in systemic terms, whereas only fifteen years earlier, in the René Diekstra affair (1996), such explanations had been close to absent. Drawing on a wealth of historical sources, the article suggests that cases like Stapel's as such do not explain why early 21st-century commentators exchanged individual explanations for systemic ones. Only against the background of an existing discourse of criticism of the science system, developed in the 1990s and 2000s in response to rapidly increasing competition for research funding, could the Stapel affair achieve notoriety as an example of how systemic factors provoke bad conduct.

Why do philosophy of history books so easily end up on the scrap heap of history? Why does nobody anymore read Raymond Martin’s The Past Within Us (1989), despite this little book offering a stimulating correction to the tendency, not uncommon in the field, of privileging conceptual reflection over empirical analysis? Why is Henri-Irénée Marrou’s “treatise on the virtues of the historian,” published in 1954 as De la connaissance historique, almost entirely forgotten, notwithstanding the “virtue turn” that is manifesting itself throughout the humanities and social sciences? Or why is Hanno Kesting’s Geschichtsphilosophie und Weltbürgerkrieg (1959) collecting dust on library shelves, despite the fact that its analysis of historical narratives underpinning the Cold War, the project of European integration, and Third World development policies aligns well with a currently thriving type of intellectual history?

This essay unearths the guiding question of David Harlan’s 1997 book, The Degradation of American History. While most commentators have focused their attention on Harlan’s biting criticism of the historical profession, this essay argues that Harlan’s diatribe against historical scholarship pursued “for its own sake” stems from a deep concern about the moral education of citizens in an age that François Hartog and others typify as “presentist.” Although Harlan’s remedies against presentism are found wanting, the essay argues that the question raised in The Degradation of American History is a relevant, timely, and still unresolved one, now even more than at the time of the book’s original publication.

This essay discusses three recent studies of ‘historical culture’: François Hartog’s Régimes d’historicité (2003), Jérôme Baschet’s Défaire la tyrannie du présent (2018), and Amin Samman’s History in financial times (2019). As different as these books may be, they share a commitment to analyzing historical thinking and reasoning ‘beyond the confines of the historian’s workshop’ (Samman). Also, despite substantial differences in empirical rigor, all three books favor conceptual hypothesizing over detailed empirical work. Assuming that historical theory performs best when these two elements are held in balance, the essay argues that concepts like ‘presentism’ may benefit from empirical testing against ethnographic research as conducted by, for instance, anthropologists of time.

What secularization has in common with modernization and democratization is that it is increasingly referred to as a ‘grand’ or ‘master narrative’. The phrase is indicative for a notable change in attitude towards the once near-obvious claim that religion in modern societies is subject to decline. Whereas historians until recently used secularization as an analytical category – writing confidently about the ‘secularization’ of science, education, politics, and so forth – such interpretations are now increasingly becoming an object of study themselves. Secularization, in other words, no longer serves as a lens through which historians write the history of religion, but is subjected to historical analysis itself. Indeed, it is seen as deserving historical attention precisely because it once was a powerful, near-hegemonic way of thinking about the fate of religion in modern societies.

This inaugural lecture outlines the contours of a history of critical thinking. Drawing on case studies from the 19th, 20th, and 21st-century humanities, it draws attention to demands that critical thinking makes on the self – that is, to skills, virtues, attitudes, and capacities characteristic of what one might call a “critical self.” On the one hand, the cultivation of such qualities in research and teaching alike is a theme that allows for cross-disciplinary comparisons of the kind that historians of the humanities like to make. On the other, it touches directly on questions of contemporary relevance. What does it mean to foster critical thinking skills in contemporary academia? Is critical thinking compatible with care and compassion, or does it cultivate a stance of detachment, perhaps even of suspicion? Is critical thinking a much-needed remedy against fake news, or are societies struggling with political polarization and diminishing trust in public institutions likely to benefit more from a “postcritical turn”?

‘“Post-Christian Era”? Nonsense!’ declared one of Europe’s foremost theologians, Karl Barth, in August 1948 at the first assembly of the World Council of Churches in Amsterdam. Barth’s criticism notwithstanding, ‘post-Christian’ was a term that rose to prominence in mid-twentieth-century diagnoses of modernity. From the 1930s onwards, growing numbers of Protestant and Catholic thinkers perceived Europe, or more broadly the Western world, as entering a ‘post-Christian’ phase. The post-prefix was deeply ambiguous, however. For some, it conveyed that Europe had broken with its Christian past – a break that could alternatively be interpreted as liberation or estrangement. Others, by contrast, used the post-prefix to argue that various emerging forms of ‘secularism’ were historically indebted to Europe’s Christian past. Thus, Arnold J. Toynbee told an Oxford audience in 1940 that liberalism, communism and fascism were all leaves ‘taken from the book of Christianity’. Surveying the career of ‘post-Christian’ in mid-twentieth-century Germany, France, England and the Netherlands (with a brief excursion to the United States), this chapter argues that the term was able to achieve prominence because the ‘post’ allowed for different kinds of self-positioning vis-à-vis ‘Christianity’ and ‘modern culture’. Interestingly, however, in almost all cases, these positioning strategies drew on historicist resources in portraying the modern ‘age’ or ‘era’ as a new epoch in the development of Western culture.

The introduction guides the reader through the goals of this volume and the methodological approach adopted in its chapters. Rather than offering an all-encompassing history of post-concepts, the volume aims to shed light on the meanings, nature and functions of the post-prefix in a broad array of post-constructions. The approach is threefold. First, the volume historicizes the use of the ‘post’ in the humanities and the social sciences. Second, the volume argues that post-concepts are always critical interventions in complex and often politicized societal and academic debates. As such, they do not typically describe distance or change from a root concept. Rather, they create such distance and change by allowing their users to re-periodize, reject or retool a root concept. Third, the volume facilitates a rapprochement between the social sciences and the humanities, including philosophy and theology. By systematically tracing post-concepts through the social sciences and humanities, the volume excavates a shared history replete with unexpected (biographical) connections, transfers and parallels between disciplines too often studied in isolation from one other. Underpinning the ambitions of this volume is a solid methodological framework comprising five interpretive principles upon which all chapters are based: positioning, performativity, transfer, interconnectedness and conceptual web.

Does the death of Hayden White mark the end of an era in philosophy of history? Although White’s personal presence is sorely missed, White’s work is unlikely soon to lose its prominent position in philosophy of history. This is because no other author occupies a position in the field that is remotely as central as White’s. His oeuvre serves as a shared reference point for scholars working on issues ranging from explanation and representation to deconstruction and presence. From whatever school or persuasion they are, philosophers of history relate to White’s work, either by building upon it or by dissociating themselves from it. In explaining this unique position of White’s work, this essay reflects as much on the field called philosophy of history as on White’s interventions in it. It argues that philosophy of history is not a discipline in a recognizable sense of the word, but a loosely knit network of scholars working on different “questions about history.” Only when this network status of the field is taken into account, it becomes possible to see why White’s work has such a central place in current philosophy of history.

To what extent did German historians in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries aspire to be “a whole man” (ein ganzer Mann)? Historians used the phrase on numerous occasions, as shorthand for a mode of masculinity that sought to reconcile demands of reason and emotion by combining astuteness, industry, and determination with imagination, love of country, and “human warmth”. This persona, however, was not as widely shared as recent literature on German historical scholarship suggests. As a contrastive ideal that was invoked especially by historians who were critical of increased specialization, “the whole man” was a counter-hegemonic persona, imbued with a distinct sense of masculinity.

In this chapter, I propose a historical equivalent of HPS (‘history and philosophy of science’) called HPH (‘history and philosophy of history’). I start with some brief comments on HPS – what it is and what it is not. Subsequently, I present four arguments in favor of HPH. Finally, I respond to some questions that my proposal might provoke, suggesting among other things that HPH is not something to be built from scratch, but a form of cooperation that is already among us, whether we call it by that name or not.

Historians of historicism have done a lot to uncover the various meanings associated with the term. By contrast, the rhetorical uses of this emotionally charged term, especially in contexts of controversy, have never received systematic attention. This chapter argues that such a rhetorical approach can bring to light patterns that have so far remained invisible. Drawing on the case of Dutch intellectuals between the 1870s and the 1970s, it examines how people used "historicism" to frame perceived dangers, appeal to anxieties broadly shared among their audiences, and depict the intellectual landscape as a battlefield with dangerous worldviews roaming around. This chapter thereby shows the fruitfulness of extending conventional history of ideas approaches with a rhetorical perspective sensitive to the emotional aspects of polemical language.

This article sketches a portrait of Hayden White (1928-2018), partly by analyzing his work, partly by interrogating him in interview form (drawing on a conversation held back in 2005). Although this mixture of genres – commentary and interview – may seem unusual, it serves two purposes: it makes this introduction to White’s thinking as accessible as possible, especially for readers not yet familiar with Metahistory or The Content of the Form, while at the same time allowing for a multiplicity of voices. These voices include not only those of interviewer and interviewee, but also, more importantly, those of the several ‘Whites’ that this article proposes to distinguish. White, after all, was not the kind of author who can easily be captured in a single frame. This article therefore portrays White in several poses, on different moments in time: as a historian, a philosopher of history, a literary theorist, a cultural theorist, an essayist, a teacher, and, last but not least, an existentialist humanist. In distinguishing these seven (partly overlapping) poses, the article seeks to offer an interpretation of White that is fundamentally multivocal, trying to do justice to a variety of genres, poses, and voices found in White.

This article sketches a portrait of Hayden White (1928-2018), partly by analyzing his work, partly by interrogating him in interview form (drawing on a conversation held back in 2005). Although this mixture of genres – commentary and interview – may seem unusual, it serves two purposes: it makes this introduction to White’s thinking as accessible as possible, especially for readers not yet familiar with Metahistory or The Content of the Form, while at the same time allowing for a multiplicity of voices. These voices include not only those of interviewer and interviewee, but also, more importantly, those of the several ‘Whites’ that this article proposes to distinguish. White, after all, was not the kind of author who can easily be captured in a single frame. This article therefore portrays White in several poses, on different moments in time: as a historian, a philosopher of history, a literary theorist, a cultural theorist, an essayist, a teacher, and, last but not least, an existentialist humanist. In distinguishing these seven (partly overlapping) poses, the article seeks to offer an interpretation of White that is fundamentally multivocal, trying to do justice to a variety of genres, poses, and voices found in White.

Dit voorjaar moest het er dan eindelijk van komen. Ik zou mijn dikwijls uitgestelde boek over deugden en ondeugden in de negentiende-eeuwse geschiedwetenschap gaan afmaken. (...) Maar toen bereikte het coronavirus onze lage landen, gingen de basisscholen dicht en vond ik mezelf terug aan de keukentafel met twee kinderen die dagelijks geholpen moesten worden met een hele stapel schoolwerk.

The figure of the politician not only mattered to politicians themselves, or to their voters. It also served as a point of reference in other fields, such as historical scholarship. Historians frequently talked about the marks of a politician, if only because they were divided over the question of how much a historian had to resemble a politician. This opens up some interesting questions: What were the traits that historians associated with the figure of the politician? Why were they so keen to compare themselves, positively or negatively, to politicians? How unique were German historians in performing such boundary work? And why would it matter, from a historiographical point of view, to study the persona of the politician through the lens of people who emphatically declared: ‘I am not a politician’?

This article seeks to advance historians' understanding of epistemic virtues in the history of historiography. Drawing on a nineteenth-century case study, it argues that virtues were often multi-layered in the sense of being charged with multiple meanings. Loyalty (Treue) is a case in point: it was, to some extent, an epistemic virtue, but simultaneously also a political virtue with conservative overtones. Loyalty served as a key concept in an idealized image that nationalistic historians and literary scholars held of the ancient Germans. Moreover, as a civic virtue, loyalty was bound up with social codes that obliged students to be loyal to their teachers-which could lead to frictions if these teachers were associated with all too pronounced views of the discipline. On this basis, the article concludes that the phrase "epistemic virtues" should be used with caution. The adjective denotes an epistemic layer of meaning which can be distinguished but never separated from social, moral, and political layers of meaning.

Language of virtue and vice such as used by nineteenth-century German historians offers a glimpse on an often neglected aspect of historical studies – that of dispositions, character traits, or virtues deemed necessary for pursuit of historical inquiry. The chapter shows that often-used phrases like “the first virtues of the historian” invoked hierarchical constellations of virtues corresponding to distinct conceptions of the historian’s vocation, which may be called scholarly personae. From this it follows that personae can be historicized: they need not be seen as a modern conceptual tool, but as modern names for schematic models of virtue that nineteenth-century historians themselves already invoked. The chapter also argues that such personae tended to be associated with outstanding historians and often came in contrastive pairs: Schlosser vs. Ranke, Waitz vs. Sybel, and Treitschke vs. Lamprecht. What these examples also illustrate is that pairs of personae could change over time, in tandem with changing debates over the historian’s vocation and the virtues it demanded.

What are scholarly personae? By way of introduction to the volume, this opening chapter explores the concept as it has been developed in various forms by Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, by scholars around the journal Persona Studies, and by historians interested in ‘the scholarly self’. Central to the approach adopted in this volume is the question, ‘What kind of a historian do I want to be?’ With examples from American and German historical studies, the chapter shows that answers to this question always draw on available templates or models of how to a historian. Identifying these models as scholarly personae, the chapter goes on to argue that research on scholarly personae is most productive when it zooms in how personae are appropriated, adapted, and applied in concrete historical settings. Guiding questions are: What personae are available to historians at a given time and place? How do they use them and to what ends? What demands do they make upon historians in terms of skills, virtues, or habits they require? And to what extent does this differ across time, space, and fields?

In her recent book, Virtus Romana, Catalina Balmaceda provides a fascinating analysis of the concept of virtus in Roman historiography. Although virtus, which translates as courage or more generally as virtue, meant different things to different Roman historians, Balmaceda shows that disagreement was never about whether historians should provide readers with examples of virtue. Historians' differences of opinion focused rather on where such models were to be found and what they should look like. This review essay summarizes Balmaceda's main arguments, raises a question about historians' own virtus, and draws some implications from the book for the study of scholarly personae. Did the persona of the historian as a public moralist, such as is known from nineteenth-century Europe, originate in ancient Rome?

Drawing on the case of Alfred Dove (1844-1916), this article contributes to an emerging line of research on scholarly personae in the history of historiography. It does so by addressing the important but so far neglected question: What exactly does the prism of scholarly personae add to existing historiographical perspectives? The German historian Alfred Dove is an appropriate case study for this exercise, because historical scholarship in Wilhelmine Germany has been relatively well studied, from various angles. Most notably, it has been studied (1) through biographical lenses, (2) from institutional points of view, (3) as the cradle of 'scientific history', with special attention to historical methods of the sort codified by Ernst Bernheim, and (4) in relation to religious and political fault lines that divided the German Empire shortly after the Franco-Prussian War and the Kulturkampf. The thesis advanced in this article is that scholarly personae are a missing link between these four dimensions and therefore a theme of key importance for anyone trying to understand German historical studies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

What, if anything, did "professional identity" mean to European Orientalists in the decades around 1900? What did it take for them to be a professor, Privatdozent, or non-academic researcher in the field of Oriental studies? What talents, virtues, or skills did this require? Also, how were these skills and virtues acquired or molded, especially but not only in educational practices, and what positive or negative models were invoked in contexts of socialization? If the models that Dozy and Fleischer had embodied came to be regarded as old-fashioned, what alternative models did Snouck, Hartmann, and Goldziher put in their place? And how were these different understandings of what it meant to be an Arabist, Egyptologist, or Sinologist related to professional identities in other areas of the Geisteswissenschaften, not to mention the emerging social sciences?

Does the death of Hayden White mark the end of an era in philosophy of history? Although White’s personal presence is sorely missed, White’s work is unlikely soon to lose its prominent position in philosophy of history. This is because no other author occupies a position in the field that is remotely as central as White’s. His oeuvre serves as a shared reference point for scholars working on issues ranging from explanation and representation to deconstruction and presence. From whatever school or persuasion they are, philosophers of history relate to White’s work, either by building upon it or by dissociating themselves from it. In explaining this unique position of White’s work, this essay reflects as much on the field called philosophy of history as on White’s interventions in it. It argues that philosophy of history is not a discipline in a recognizable sense of the word, but a loosely knit network of scholars working on different “questions about history.” Only when this network status of the field is taken into account, it becomes possible to see why White’s work has such a central place in current philosophy of history.

After Leopold von Ranke's death in 1886, quite a few memoirs appeared in which friends and students shared their memories of the famous German historian. Judging by the anecdotes they told and the vivid descriptions of Ranke's daily habits they provided - at what time he awoke, what he ate for breakfast, and so forth - this was, to a large extent, a human interest genre. What explains this broadly shared interest in the details of Ranke's personal life? What does it reveal about Ranke's status as a cultural icon and about his father role ("der Altmeister") in German historical studies?

This paper argues that the “scientific self” -- i.e., the historically contingent sets of habits, dispositions, virtues, or competencies that scientists consider important for the pursuit of scientific research -- is an embodied articulation of what scientists at a given time and place regard as good, responsible research. With examples from across the scientific spectrum (sociology, biology, history), the paper shows, more specifically, that the scientific self offers us a glimpse of research ethics in non-codified form -- a form of ethics that is less stable, more contested, and therefore at least as interesting as, say, the Nuremberg Code or the Declaration of Helsinki to the extent that it translates abstract ethical demands into concrete human character traits.

Recent years have witnessed a burgeoning interest in “epistemic virtues” as a prism for historical study of the sciences and the humanities. Although most of the literature is still confined to single fields or local cases, the potential of comparing scholars across the academic spectrum from an epistemic virtues point of view has already been recognized. Yet as soon as historians embark on such a project, they face a potential complication. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, language of virtue was often imbued with nationalist meaning. Scholars habitually appealed to stereotypical images of “French lucidity,” “German profoundness,” and “American enterprise.” Without, of course, endorsing such nationalist rhetoric, this article argues that nationalized virtues are useful material for comparative histories of the sciences and the humanities, given that they served as commonplaces on which scholars from various disciplinary backgrounds could draw. Consequently, commonplaces could do what discipline-specific idioms could not: enabling transdisciplinary conversations about the marks of a good scholar. Phrases like “German thoroughness,” the use of which this article examines for the case of Johns Hopkins University in the first three decades of its existence (1876–1906), offer historians a unique opportunity for tracing epistemic virtues across disciplinary boundaries.

Neo-Scholastic philosophy has not seldom been interpreted as a system of thought so thoroughly committed to timeless truth that it was incapable of viewing historical change in other than negative terms. Gerald McCool, for instance, argued as recently as 2003 that Neo-Scholasticism aspired to be a “changeless unified system” and therefore looked with great suspicion at historicizing treatments of the medieval past, with their explicit or implicit challenge of the presumed coherence of medieval scholastic philosophy. But were late nineteenth-century Neo-Scholastics really as afraid of “history” in the sense of change and context-dependency of philosophical positions as McCool assumes? Were they really committed to a “timelessness” incompatible with development over time? How convincing is, in other words, McCool’s master narrative (“from unhistorical thinking to historical sensitivity”) in the light of how late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Neo-Scholastic philosophers themselves conceived of their work in relation to that of their medieval predecessors?

This essay discusses an almost forgotten text by Hayden White: a 1959 book review published in the journal Speculum. The brief text offers an interesting glimpse on the medieval historian that was White in 1959 – though one who clearly was on his way of becoming a historical theorist. At the same time, the review raises a number of questions with which historians still find themselves struggling. What are the moral interventions that historians make through their books and articles? And is it true, as White memorably put it, that “no historian worthy of the name is only an historian”?

Frank Ankersmit is often perceived as a postmodern thinker, as a European Hayden White, or as an author whose work in political philosophy can safely be ignored by those interested only in his philosophy of history. Although none of these perceptions is entirely wrong, they are of little help in understanding the nature of Ankersmit’s work and the sources on which it draws. Specifically, they do not elucidate the extent to which Ankersmit raises questions different from White’s, finds himself inspired by continental European traditions, responds to specifically Dutch concerns, and is as active as a public intellectual as he has been prolific in philosophy of history. In order to propose a more comprehensive and balanced interpretation of Ankersmit’s work, this article offers a contextual reading based largely on Dutch-language sources, some of which are unknown even in the Netherlands. The thesis advanced is that Ankersmit draws consistently on nineteenth-century German historicism as interpreted by Friedrich Meinecke and advocated by his Groningen teacher, Ernst Kossmann. Without forcing each and every element of Ankersmit’s oeuvre into a historicist mold, the article demonstrates that some of its most salient aspects can profitably be read as attempts at translating and modifying historicist key notions into late twentieth-century categories. Also, without creating a father myth of the sort that White helped create around his teacher William Bossenbrook, the article argues that Ankersmit at crucial moments in his intellectual trajectory draws on texts and authors central to Kossmann’s research interests.

Epistemic virtues offer a promising angle for studying interaction between fields of research conventionally classified under the " sciences " and the " humanities. " Given that virtues like objectivity, honesty, and accuracy are not confined to specific disciplines, they allow for comparative historical research between scientific fields as well as for histories of transfer, borrowing, and adaptation between disciplines. Such research, however, requires ample attention to what scientists in specific settings understood epistemic virtues to mean.

Dogmatism is generally regarded as a bad thing. For scientists in particular, there are few more disconcerting vices than dogmatism. But what exactly does this term mean? Where does it come from and how does its centuries-long history resonate in current debates?

This open-access book, co-authored by Herman Paul and Alexander Stoeger, traces the history of dogmatism as a scholarly vice term. Starting in ancient Greece, but with an emphasis on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it follows the term across periods, countries, and disciplines. It shows how new layers of meaning emerged over time, while older ones sometimes remained surprisingly persistent.

According to Paul and Stoeger, this combination of semantic flexibility and historical connotations helps explain why dogmatism, unlike other ancient vice terms, is still with us as a chameleonic concept that can be pitted against open-mindedness, critical thinking, progress, and innovation.

The book makes an original contribution to the history of scholarly virtues and vices and, more broadly, to a transdisciplinary history of the sciences, social sciences, and humanities.

Available in open access at https://www.bloomsburycollections.com/monograph?docid=b-9781350399563

What are the humanities? As the cluster of disciplines historically grouped together as “humanities” has grown and diversified to include media studies and digital studies alongside philosophy, art history and musicology to name a few, the need to clearly define the field is pertinent. Herman Paul leads a stellar line-up of esteemed and early-career scholars to provide an overview of the themes, questions and methods that are central to current research on the history of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century humanities. This exciting addition to the successful Writing History series will draw from a wide range of case-studies from diverse fields, as classical philology, art history, and Biblical studies, to provide a state-of-the-art overview of the field. In doing so, this ground-breaking book challenges the rigid distinctions between disciplines and show the variety of prisms through which historians of the humanities study the past.

Table of Contents:

Preface
List of Illustrations
List of Tables
List of Contributors

Introduction: What Is the History of the Humanities?, Herman Paul (Leiden University, The Netherlands)

Part I: Definitions and Backgrounds

1. What Are the Humanities? A Short History of Concepts and Classifications, Fabian Krämer (University of Munich, Germany)
2. From Philology to the Humanities: Fragmentation and Discipline Formation in the United Kingdom and United States, James Turner (University of Notre Dame, USA)
3. The Humanities in Crisis: Comparative Perspectives on a Recurring Motif, Hampus Östh Gustafsson (Uppsala University, Sweden)

Part II: Research Practices

4. Modernizing the Comparative Method: Marx and Darwin, Devin Griffiths (University of Southern California, USA)
5. Language and the Mapping of the World: Nineteenth-Century Linguistics in Relation to Ethnology and Geography, Floris Solleveld (KU Leuven, Belgium)
6. “Big”-ness in Action: Notes from a Lexicon, Christian Bradley Flow (Mississippi State University, USA)
7. Oral History and the (Digital) Humanities, Julianne Nyhan and Andrew Flinn (both University College London, UK)

Part III: Values and Virtues

8. Practical Learning: The Transnational Career of an Epistemic Value in Japan, Michael Facius (University of Tokyo, Japan)
9. An Ethos of Criticism: Virtues and Vices in Nineteenth-Century Strasbourg, Herman Paul (Leiden University, The Netherlands)
10. Producing the Masculine Scholar: Europe in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Falko Schnicke (Johannes Kepler University, Linz, Austria)
11. Scholarly Activism in Africa: The General History of Africa (1964–98), Larissa Schulte Nordholt (Leiden University, The Netherlands)

Part IV: Teaching Practices

12. The Humanities in the Vocational University: On the Unity of Teaching and Research, Kasper Risbjerg Eskildsen (Roskilde University, Denmark)
13. On the Purpose of Humanities Education: A Historical Perspective from the Mid-Twentieth-Century United States, Claire Rydell Arcenas (University of Montana, USA)

Part V: Visions of the Future

14. A Postcritical Turn? Unravelling the Meaning of “Post” and “Turn”, Herman Paul (Leiden University, The Netherlands)
15. Environmental Humanities: Entangled Interdisciplinarity, Kristine Steenbergh (Vrije University Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
16. Humanities across Time and Space: Four Challenges for a New Discipline, Rens Bod (University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands)

Glossary
Index

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/writing-the-history-of-the-humanities-9781350199101/

Why do historians so often talk about objectivity, empathy, and fair-mindedness? What roles do such personal qualities play in historical studies? And why does it make sense to call them virtues rather than skills or habits? Historians' Virtues is the first publication to explore these questions in some depth. With case studies from across the centuries, the Element identifies major discontinuities in how and why historians talked about the marks of a good scholar. At the same time, it draws attention to long-term legacies that last until today. Virtues were, and are, invoked in debates over the historian's task. They reveal how historians position themselves vis-à-vis political regimes, religious traditions, or neoliberal university systems. More importantly, they show that historical study not only requires knowledge and technical skills, but also makes demands on the character of its practitioners. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108993067

What does it mean to live in an era of ‘posts’? At a time when ‘post-truth’ is on everyone’s lips, this volume seeks to uncover the logic of post-constructions – postmodernism, post-secularism, postfeminism, post-colonialism, post-capitalism, post-structuralism, post-humanism, post-tradition, post-Christian, post-Keynesian and post-ideology – across a wide array of contexts. It shows that ‘post’ does not simply mean ‘after.’ Although post-prefixes sometimes denote a particular periodization, especially in the case of mid-twentieth-century post-concepts, they more often convey critical dissociation from their root concept. In some cases, they even indicate a continuation of the root concept in an altered form. By surveying the range of meanings that post-prefixes convey, as well as how these meanings have changed over time and across multiple and shifting contexts, this volume sheds new light on how post-constructions work and on what purposes they serve. Moreover, by tracing them across the humanities and social sciences, the volume uncovers sometimes unexpected parallels and transfers between fields usually studied in isolation from each other.

Available in open access at https://www.manchesterhive.com/display/9781526148179/9781526148179.xml

What makes a good historian? When historians raise this question, as they have done for centuries, they often do so to highlight that certain personal attitudes or dispositions are indispensable for studying the past. Yet their views on what virtues, skills, or competencies historians need most differ remarkably, as do their models of how to be a historian (‘scholarly personae’).

This volume explores why scholarly personae were, and are, so important to historians as to generate lots of debate. Why do historians seldom agree on the marks of a good historian? What impact do these disagreements have on historical research, teaching, and outreach? And what does this tell about the unity, or disunity, of the field called historical studies?

In addressing these questions, How to be a historian develops a fascinating new perspective on the history of historiography. It challenges conventional narratives of professionalisation by demonstrating that the identity of the ‘professional’  was often contested. At the same time, it shows that personae could be remarkably stable, especially with regard to their race, class, and gender assumptions.

With chapters by Monika Baár, Ian Hunter, Q. Edward Wang, and other recognized specialists, How to be a historian covers historical studies across Europe, North America, Africa, and East Asia, throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in liberal democracies and authoritarian regimes alike.

The volume will appeal not only to historians of historiography, but to all historians who occasionally wonder: What kind of a historian do I want to be?

This volume examines how the history of the humanities might be written through the prism of scholarly personae, understood as time- and place-specific models of being a scholar. Focusing on the field of study known as Orientalism in the decades around 1900, this volume examines how Semitists, Sinologists, and Japanologists, among others, conceived of their scholarly tasks, what sort of demands these job descriptions made on the scholar in terms of habits, virtues, and skills, and how models of being an orientalist changed over time under influence of new research methods, cross-cultural encounters, and political transformations.

Waarom spraken negentiende-eeuwse wetenschappers zo graag over toewijding, vlijt en ijver? Waarom wijdde Robert Fruin zijn oratie aan onpartijdigheid en riep Abraham Kuenen zijn studenten op tot waarheidsliefde? Vaak zijn deze deugden weggezet als naïeve idealen, die kentheoretisch allang achterhaald zijn. Daar tegenover stelt dit boek dat negentiende-eeuwse wetenschappers over deugden spraken omdat zij waarde hechtten aan een wetenschappelijke attitude. Het ging hen niet om kentheorie, maar om wetenschapsethiek avant la lettre.

Herman Paul betoogt dat het cultiveren van zo’n wetenschappelijke attitude in allerlei vakgebieden, binnen en buiten de geesteswetenschappen, van belang werd geacht. Daarom is het thema van wetenschappelijke deugden en ondeugden bij uitstek geschikt voor een discipline-overstijgende geschiedenis van de (geestes)wetenschappen.

De deugden van een wetenschapper zet een originele onderzoekslijn uit, geïllustreerd met voorbeelden uit Nederland, België en Duitsland. Ook houdt het boek een interessante, negentiende-eeuwse spiegel voor aan hedendaagse wetenschappers. Valt er van Fruin en Kuenen iets te leren, bijvoorbeeld met het oog op wetenschappelijke integriteit?

This book explores how physicists, astronomers, chemists, and historians in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries employed ‘epistemic virtues’ such as accuracy, objectivity, and intellectual courage. In doing so, it takes the first step in providing an integrated history of the sciences and humanities. It assists in addressing such questions as:

What kind of perspective would enable us to compare organic chemists in their labs with paleographers in the Vatican Archives, or anthropologists on a field trip with mathematicians poring over their formulas?
While the concept of epistemic virtues has previously been discussed, primarily in the contexts of the history and philosophy of science, this volume is the first to enlist the concept in bridging the gap between the histories of the sciences and the humanities. Chapters research whether epistemic virtues can serve as a tool to transcend the institutional disciplinary boundaries and thus help to attain a ‘post-disciplinary’ historiography of modern knowledge. Readers will gain a contextualization of epistemic virtues in time and space as the book shows that scholars themselves often spoke in terms of virtue and vice about their tasks and accomplishments.

This collection of essays opens up new perspectives on questions, discourses, and practices shared across the disciplines, even at a time when the neo-Kantian distinction between sciences and humanities enjoyed its greatest authority. Scholars including historians of science and of the humanities, intellectual historians, virtue epistemologists, and philosophers of science will all find this book of particular interest and value.

‘Voor het eerst is het zover: Nederland telt meer ongelovigen dan gelovigen’, kopte Trouw in 2015. Zeventien procent van de Nederlanders gelooft in God, zo bleek uit onderzoek, en 25 procent onderschrijft de stelling ‘er bestaat geen God of hogere macht of kracht’. Trouw en andere media duidden deze cijfers als uitkomst van een lange ontwikkeling. Geloof boert in dit land achteruit, zoals religie in moderne samenlevingen überhaupt niet zoveel kansen heeft.

Secularisatie is de naam van dit clichébeeld over religie in het moderne Westen. Secularisatie is een groot verhaal van religieuze achteruitgang. Het is het verhaal dat journalisten en religieuze leiders vertellen als zij geconfronteerd worden met kerksluiting, afnemende invloed van priesters, dominees, rabbijnen en imams, en de marginalisering van confessionele partijen in de Tweede Kamer. Het is ook het verhaal dat gewone mensen vertellen als zij uitleggen waarom zij niet meer in God geloven, de kerk de rug toegekeerd hebben of de moskee verlaten. Godsdienstwetenschappers plaatsen vraagtekens bij dit grote verhaal. Religie is allesbehalve marginaal, zelfs al gaat in Nederland slechts een minderheid naar de kerk. Was secularisatie vijftig jaar geleden een academisch modewoord, tegenwoordig spreken wetenschappers liever over ‘postseculiere’ samenlevingen.

In Secularisatie. Een kleine geschiedenis van een groot verhaal gaat Herman Paul de opkomst, achtergronden en lotgevallen van secularisatie na. Het boek bespreekt voorbeelden uit allerlei landen en religieuze tradities en zet zowel gelovigen als ongelovigen aan het denken.

El presente ensayo debe enmarcarse en un amplio proceso de renovación en el ámbito de la teoría de la historia que está teniendo lugar en la última década. Íntimamente relacionado con los debates anunciados en los últimos años en revistas como History and Theory o Journal of the Philosophy of History, en los que Herman Paul ha representado un papel protagonista, la nueva teoría de la historia del siglo XXI pretende ofrecer puentes para superar la fuerte polarización existente entre la profesión acerca de sus propios fundamentos cognitivos. Síntesis como tesis, el mérito de este libro consiste en poner en orden, con un lenguaje claro y asequible, plagado de ejemplos explicativos, los grandes problemas del pensamientos histórico, mayoritariamente profesional, pero también en términos culturales más amplios.

Key Issues in Historical Theory is a fresh, clear and well-grounded introduction to this vibrant field of inquiry, incorporating many examples from novels, paintings, music, and political debates. The book expertly engages the reader in discussions of what history is, how people relate to the past and how they are formed by the past.

Over 11 thematically-based chapters, Herman Paul discusses subjects such as:
•history, memory and trauma
•historical experience and narrative
•moral and political dimensions of history
•historical reasoning and explanation
•truth, plausibility and objectivity.

Key Issues in Historical Theory convincingly shows that historical theory is not limited to reflection on professional historical studies, but offers valuable tools for understanding autobiographical writing, cultural heritage and political controversies about the past.

With textboxes providing additional focus on a range of key topics, this is an attractive, accessible and up-to-date guide to the field of historical theory.

This new book offers a clear and accessible exposition of Hayden White's thought. In an engaging and wide-ranging analysis, Herman Paul discusses White's core ideas and traces the development of these ideas from the mid-1950s to the present. Starting with White's medievalist research and youthful fascination for French existentialism, Paul shows how White became increasingly convinced that historical writing is a moral activity. He goes on to argue that the critical concepts that have secured White's fame – trope, plot, discourse, figural realism – all stem from his desire to explicate the moral claims and perceptions underlying historical writing. White emerges as a passionate thinker, a restless rebel against scientism, and a defender of existentialist humanist values. This innovative introduction will appeal to students and scholars across the humanities, and help develop a critical understanding of an increasingly important thinker.

Wat is geschiedenis? Wat verstaan we onder het verleden en waarom ‘trekt’ dit verleden zo, dat duizenden mensen historische films bekijken of musea bezoeken? Als archeologische themaparken en genealogische onderzoekscentra elke week weer vol zitten, wat voor soort belangstelling voor het verleden spreekt daar dan uit? En hoe verhoudt deze ‘populaire’ historische cultuur zich tot de ‘wetenschappelijke’ geschiedbeoefening van academische historici? Als het verleden trekt is een toegankelijke inleiding in de geschiedfilosofie – het vakgebied dat over deze en vergelijkbare vragen nadenkt. Aan de hand van concrete voorbeelden, ontleend aan politieke debatten, archeologische opgravingen, klassieke muziek, romans en schilderijen, bespreekt het boek de voornaamste problemen die de afgelopen anderhalve eeuw op de geschiedfilosofische agenda hebben gestaan. Uniek aan dit boek is zijn opzet: elk hoofdstuk is gewijd aan een ‘relatie’ die mensen met het verleden onderhouden. Historisch denken, stelt dit boek, is een samenspel van materiële, morele, politieke, esthetische en epistemologische relaties met het verleden.

Vertelt het verleden ons wie we zijn? Wijst de geschiedenis ons een weg naar de toekomst? Is historisch besef wel nuttig in een samenleving die ingrijpend verandert? De kruitdampen van de Eerste Wereldoorlog waren nog niet opgetrokken, of deze sceptische vragen doken in heel Europa op. Was de negentiende eeuw een tijdperk van historisch denken geweest – ‘in het verleden ligt het heden, in het nu wat worden zal’ – de twintigste eeuw wist hiermee weinig raad meer. Politici, journalisten, predikanten en filosofen: elk op hun eigen manier zochten ze naar de mogelijkheden, beperkingen en valkuilen van historisch denken. Opvallend genoeg cirkelde dit debat vaak rond één enkel woord: historisme. Zoals ‘postmodernisme’ in de jaren negentig op ieders lippen lag, zo was ‘historisme’ in de jaren twintig en nog lang daarna een kernwoord voor velen die over geschiedenis nadachten. Het moeras van de geschiedenis vertelt hoe dit debat in Nederland gevoerd werd. Het presenteert een bonte stoet van musici, architecten, literatuurwetenschappers, historici en theologen, die rond het woord ‘historisme’ elk hun eigen kijk op geschiedenis ontwikkelden.

‘Boeroeboedoer der bourgeoisie’ was een frase die in Leiden meer dan eens ironisch geciteerd of zelfs als geuzennaam werd toegeëigend – eerst door Karel van het Reve,  die met vrienden om tien flessen sterke drank had gewed dat hij de zinsnede in zijn oratie zou durven te gebruiken,  en later ook door Willem Otterspeer in diverse publicaties over de Leidse universiteit.  Hoe valt dit te verklaren? Wat maakt dit beeld voor Willem zo aantrekkelijk (over Van het Reve zal ik zwijgen)?

The lecturer will replace Prof. Herman Paul in teaching Historical Theory to research master students. In addition, he/she will teach a couple of other courses, in the English-language master program and preferably also in the Dutch-language bachelor program. Preference will be given to candidates with a broad teaching scope (e.g., the ability to teach courses in political or cultural history).

As part of a larger project on "Scholarly Vices: A Longue Durée History," this postdoc project inquires: How prominent was language of vice in twentieth-century scientific codes of conduct? Commenting on the American Medical Association’s Code of Ethics, Albert Jonsen observes that even the newest version of the code “remained a compendium of the traditional deontology, decorum, and politic ethics.” Likewise, The Chemist’s Creed, adopted by the American Chemical Association in 1965, creatively combined “honor” and “virtue” with “interest” and “duty,” just as the American Historical Association’s Statement on Standards of Professional Conduct (1987) used an amalgam of “rules,” “values,” and “virtues” to describe the historian’s moral responsibilities. If idioms employed in codes of conduct could be as idiosyncratic as these examples suggest, then to what extent did early modern language of vice, too, persist in this genre? The project examines this question on the basis of some one hundred scholarly codes of ethics, varying from the electrical engineers’ Code of Ethics (1907) and the Code of Ethics for Scientific Men (1927) issued by the American Association for the Advancement of Science to the Association of Social Science Researchers’ Code of Ethics (1996). They are all available in the Ethics Code Collection (ECC) – the world’s largest online repository of codes of conduct, maintained by the Illinois Institute of Technology (http://ethics.iit.edu/ecodes). In assessing the prevalence and relative prominence of language of vice, the project pays special attention to intertextuality (i.e., textual dependency relations) within the genre. More information: https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/vacatures/2020/q1/20-061-6861-postdoc-researcher-pride-and-prejudice

As part of a larger project on "Scholarly Vices: A Longue Durée History," this postdoc project inquires: What kind of evaluative languages did 20th-century scholars use in assessing each other’s work? To what extent did they employ time-honored language of vice, for instance in drawing attention to “prejudiced” arguments or “dogmatic” ways of reasoning? In addressing this question, the project zooms in on book reviews: a genre that was practiced across the 20th century and across the academic spectrum, although with more intensity in some fields than in others, given the different value attached to publications in book form. The principal source for this sub-project is the journal Science (1880), which broadly covers the life and natural sciences, to which The American Journal of Sociology (1895) and The American Historical Review (1895) are added for the sake of including social science and humanities perspectives. Focusing on four benchmark years (1900, 1933, 1967, 2000), the project examines the book reviews published in these journals with an eye to assessing the prevalence and relative importance of language of vice. What evaluative languages (errors, mistakes, vices, etc.) did book reviewers employ? To what extent and on what occasions did they use language of vice? And to what extent did this differ across fields or change over the course of the century? More information: https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/vacatures/2020/q1/20-062-6862-postdoc-researcher-falling-short-of-expectations

Although “Baconianism” was initially synonymous with inductive methods of a kind regarded as constitutive of British empiricism, Bacon’s idola mentis – idols of the tribe, cave, marketplace, and theater – began to attract major attention only when inductivism lost its epistemic authority under the influence of, mainly, Hume and Stuart Mill. They were picked up by a broad range of 19th- and early 20th-century thinkers, including Alexander Herzen, Thomas Huxley, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Emile Durkheim, John Dewey, and Max Scheler. Why did these mostly anti-positivist critics hark back to Bacon’s idols, despite “Baconianism” increasingly being associated with epistemic naivety? From where did they derive this commonplace and why was it attractive to them? Drawing on a broad array of mostly digitized sources, this sub-project examines modern retrievals of Bacon’s idols, thereby testing Justus von Liebig’s intriguing observation, back in 1863, that Bacon’s name lived on mainly in mottos or stereotypical phrases. More importantly, it examines the rhetorical purposes served by these phrases. To what extent did the classic status of Bacon’s idola add rhetorical power to epistemological criticism of “flawed,” “biased,” or “impure” scholarship?

More information: https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/vacancies/2019/q2/19-148-phd-position-idols-of-the-mind

In the German lands, an unbroken tradition of student advice literature known as Hodegetik existed from the late 17th to the late 19th century. It offered encyclopedic surveys of the fields of knowledge, while also teaching first-year students how to develop studious habits. Given the popularity of hodegetical courses, especially in the 18th and early 19th centuries, and the wide circulation of hodegetical textbooks, many 19th-century scholars in Europe must have been at least moderately familiar with the hodegetical tradition. Drawing on a selection of key titles, including H. A. Mertens’s Hodegetischer Entwurf (1779) and K. H. Scheidler’s Grundlinien der Hodegetik (1832), this sub-project examines how hodegetical textbooks relied on each other in warning their readers against vicious habits, how much continuity their catalogs of vice displayed, and to what extent vices that persisted throughout the 18th and 19th centuries were associated with easy-to-remember commonplaces (“the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom”), anecdotes (absent-minded professors), or stereotypical images (dogmatic scholasticism).

More information: https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/vacancies/2019/q2/19-147-phd-position-hodegetics-language

Emblematic stories about scholarly vice such as codified in William Whewell’s History of the Inductive Sciences (1837) found their way into countless 19th- and 20th-century histories of science. This is true not only for Whewell’s image of the dark Middle Ages – the “barren period, which intervened between the scientific activity of ancient Greece, and that of modern Europe” – but also for anecdotes such as Vergilius of Salzburg being censured by Pope Zachary and Galileo being condemned by the Inquisition. Whewell in turn borrowed these story elements from Diderot’s and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie, just as his “emplotment” of the history of science as a gradual triumph of virtue over vice was indebted, more generally, to 18th-century histories of science, dictionaries of arts and science, and historia literaria. In comparing a selection of 18th-century histories to a representative sample of 19th-century histories of science, this sub-project examines to what extent anecdotes, commonplaces, and stereotypical images contributed to the long-term persistence of early modern vices such as dogmatism.

More information: https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/vacancies/2019/q2/19-146-phd-position-the-dark-middle-ages

Although the history of dogmatism is usually framed in epistemological terms, as ranging from Glanvill’s criticism of Hobbes to Locke, Hume, and Kant, the history of dogmatism as “a weapon of offence” can also be written from a rhetorical point of view, with particular attention to the historical connotations invoked by the term. Why was dogmatism so often presented as a “relapse” (Rückfall) into pre-critical thinking? Was dogmatism, notwithstanding Kuhn’s attempt at rehabilitation, an effective charge mainly because it relegated opponents to a superseded stage in the development of science? And why was dogmatism often associated with phrases such as Glanvill’s “vanity of dogmatizing,” Kant’s “dogmatic slumber,” and Huxley’s “history records that whenever science and dogmatism have been fairly opposed, the latter has been forced to retire from the lists, bleeding and crushed”? This sub-project traces how, why, and under what circumstances 19th- and 20th-century scientists invoked the trope of “dogmatism,” especially though not exclusively in controversies. What does in-depth analysis of such  controversies reveal about the rhetorical power of dogmatism and to what extent does this help explain the persistence of dogmatism over time?

More information: https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/vacancies/2019/q2/19-145-postdoc-position-scholarly-dogmatism

Call for papers: In addition to keynote lectures by Garry Dorrien, David N. Myers, and George Steinmetz, the organizers are soliciting proposals for 20-minute papers. Abstracts of 200-300 words are due by February 15, 2018, and can be send to Adriaan van Veldhuizen at [email protected].

This conference aims to foster a conversation between historians of early modern science and scholars working on post-1800 science (the humanities and social sciences included) on continuities and discontinuities in how scholars conceived of epistemic vices. Deadline for submissions: June 15, 2017.

CALL FOR PAPERS: The Persona of the Historian: Repertoires and Performances, 1800-2000

Institute for History, Leiden University, the Netherlands, 26-27 January 2017

Background
What does it take to be a good historian? What are the capacities or dispositions needed to thrive as an historian? Put differently, what are the talents, skills, and virtues that historians  qua historians have to cultivate? What are the “passions” or the “vices” they are expected to resist? And how do such ideas about “the scholarly self” change over time?
In recent years, historians working on issues of scholarly selfhood have introduced the term “scholarly personae” (or scientific personae) to draw attention to models or templates of scholarly selfhood, and to creative, idiosyncratic appropriations or performances of such repertoires by individual scholars.
Although authors such as Lorraine Daston, H. Otto Sibum, Conrad Condren, Stephen Gaukroger, and Ian Hunter disagree on the exact nature of scholarly personae, they all address scholarly selfhood in terms of repertoires that never entirely disappear, but remain available, dominantly or marginally, manifestly or latently, with the possibility of being re-appropriated, in different forms, if circumstances so require.
Conference aims
This conference reexamines the history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century historical scholarship through the prism of scholarly personae. It seeks to enrich existing literature by exploring the “psychagogical” dimensions of historical studies – how did historians mold their scholarly selves? –  as well as to challenge the conventional view that such approaches succeed each other like generations. Specifically, the conference addresses three questions:
(1)  What were the most important, the most neglected, and the most contested scholarly personae in nineteenth- and twentieth-century historiography?
(2)  How did such personae function (as models to be imitated, as embodiments of virtues, as educational templates, as stereotypical objectified images, as shorthand for historiographical schools or traditions)?
(3)  If personae are like repertoires, to what extent then do they allow for a rewriting of the history of historiography, not in terms of “succession,” but in terms of “sedimentation” (a gradual enrichment of available repertoires, with layers of possibilities that grow over time)?
The working definition assumed in these questions is that scholarly personae are models of what it takes, in terms of capacities and dispositions, to be a good historian. Although personae are often named after individual scholars, they tend towards the ideal-typical by embodying abstract priorities (e.g., accuracy over scope, independent judgment over reverence for the nation state). Characteristic of those priorities, finally, is that they make demands on the historian’s self – on skills, talents, virtues, and character traits – which helps explain why personae were, and are, especially relevant in educational contexts (what are the traits that students have to develop in order to become good historians?).

Papers
The conference will feature Ian Hunter (Queensland) as a keynote speaker. Other confirmed speakers include Monika Baár (Leiden), Michael Bentley (St Andrews), Elise Garritzen (Helsinki), David N. Myers (UCLA), and Edward Q. Wang (Rowan).
There is space for a maximum of ten additional papers that address any of the three questions listed above. While the conference focuses on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there are no geographical limitations – papers dealing with non-European historiography are especially welcome. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
• The Historian as Nation Builder: Transatlantic Transfers of an Contested Persona
• Reviving the Maurist Tradition: Catholic Historians between Dogma and Source Criticism
• Jørgen Tesman: Literary Representations of the Dry-as-Dust Historian
• Against Patriarchy: How Did the Persona of the Feminist Historian Evolve over Time?
• The Post-Colonial Challenge: Reinventing the Scholarly Self in India
• The Historian as Entrepreneur: Standards of Excellence in Grant Competitions

References
• Conal Condren, Stephen Gaukroger, and Ian Hunter, “Introduction,” in The Philosopher in Early Modern Europe: The Nature of a Contested Identity, ed. Conal Condren, Stephen Gaukroger, and Ian Hunter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 1-16.
• Lorraine Daston and H. Otto Sibum, “Introduction: Scientific Personae and Their Histories,” Science in Context 16 (2003), 1-8.
• Ian Hunter, “The History of Philosophy and the Persona of the Philosopher,” Modern Intellectual History 4 (2007), 571-600.
• Herman Paul, “What Is a Scholarly Persona? Ten Theses on Virtues, Skills, and Desires,” History and Theory 53 (2014), 348-371.

Abstracts
Please submit 300-word abstracts with relevant contact details by June 15, 2016 to Herman Paul at [email protected]. Notification of acceptance will be given by July 1, 2016.

Other practicalities
• The conference language will be English
• The conference venue will be Leiden University (not far from Schiphol Airport)
• Speakers will be exempted from the conference fee
• Lunches and a conference dinner will be offered to all speakers at no cost
• Costs for travel and lodging will NOT be reimbursed
• Publication of a selection of the papers is envisioned

Organization
This conference is organized by Herman Paul in the context of his NWO-funded research project, “The Scholarly Self: Character, Habit, and Virtue in the Humanities, 1860-1930.” For more information, please contact Herman Paul at [email protected]