Virtues and Vices in the Nineteenth-Century Humanities

Explorations of a Discourse
Erscheinungsjahr 2025
ISBN: 978-90-485-6298-5
Verlag: Amsterdam University Press

Buch, Englisch, Band 7, 298 Seiten, Format (B × H): 163 mm x 240 mm, Gewicht: 653 g

Reihe: Studies in the History of Knowledge

What do scholars do when they talk about virtues (impartiality, accuracy) or vices (dogmatism, prejudice)? Against the common view that such high-minded talk is largely irrelevant to actual scholarly practice, this volume proposes to treat it as a practice in its own right.

Drawing on case studies from the nineteenth-century humanities (with occasional forays into physics, chemistry, and medicine), Paul shows that notions of virtue and vice were an evaluative discourse used across the academic spectrum.

Paul argues that this evaluative idiom is best studied from a rhetorical point of view, with due attention to repertoires on which scholars drew, explicit or implicit appeals to authority, multi-layered meanings of virtue and vice terms, different uses to which these concepts were put, and societal contexts that lent plausibility to scholars’ invocations of virtue and vice.

Based on more than a decade of research, this volume will be a key reference for scholars interested in virtues, vices, and the history of the humanities.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Paul, Herman

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtswissenschaft Allgemein Geschichtswissenschaft: Theorie und Methoden
• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Erkenntnistheorie

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction: A Rhetorical Approach to Scholarly Virtues and Vices

Part I: Across Disciplines

1. The Scholarly Self: Ideals of Intellectual Virtue in Nineteenth-Century Leiden

2. Weber, Wöhler, and Waitz: Virtue Language in Late Nineteenth-Century Physics, Chemistry, and History

3. An Ethos of Criticism: Virtues and Vices in Nineteenth-Century Strasbourg

Part II: Rhetorical Uses

4. Hypercriticism: A Case Study in the Rhetoric of Vice

5. Denial of Coevalness: Charges of Dogmatism in the Nineteenth-Century Humanities (with Caroline Schep)

6. Virtue Language in Nineteenth-Century Orientalism: A Case Study in Historical Epistemology

Part III: Cultural Repertoires

7. German Thoroughness in Baltimore: Epistemic Virtues and National Stereotypes

8. The Icarus Flight of Speculation: Philosophers’ Vices as Perceived by Nineteenth-Century Historians and Physicists (with Sjang ten Hagen)

9. Labor ipse voluptas: Virtues of Work in Nineteenth-Century Germany

Acknowledgments

Index

Über Autor(innen)

Paul, Herman
Herman Paul is Professor of the History of the Humanities at Leiden University. He is the author, most recently, of Historians’ Virtues: From Antiquity to the Twenty-First Century (2022) and Dogmatism: On the History of a Scholarly Vice (with Alexander Stoeger, 2024). In 2024, he was elected a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW).