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Geisteswissenschaft

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Geisteswissenschaften (German pronunciation: [ˈɡaɪstəsˌvɪsənʃaftən], "sciences of mind", lit. "spirit science") is a set of human sciences such as philosophy, history, philology, musicology, linguistics, theater studies, literary studies, media studies, religious studies and sometimes even jurisprudence, that are traditional in German universities. Most of its subject matter would come under Humanities in the typical English-speaking university.

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Transcription

As we all know there are two academic cultures: the natural sciences and the humanities. These two cultures are normally carefully separated from each other in almost all universities. Each one in its respective building, separated by several worlds. Typically, members of these specialities can’t quite communicate with each other very well The question is: Where does this problem really come from? To begin with, I'd like to tell you the story of two discoveries. One of them in the year 1754. In 1754 a private teacher is at home in Prussia thinking about the cosmos. Without making use of measuring devices and without any mathematical formula he writes a small book in which he explains the origin of the cosmos. He is so proud of his work that he sent a copy to the king of Prussia, Frederick the Great, who received it in 1755. And this king, Frederick the Great, has even a chair, a vacant chair in Metaphysics and Logic, that was announced in 1756 but won't be occupied, as Frederick the Great has other concerns than astronomy at that time: He is preparing the Seven Year's War. So the work of this teacher has no effect and sinks into oblivion for 100 years. The name of this work is "Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens". And the initiated among you will know who wrote this book: its author was Immanuel Kant. It is undoubtedly surprising that in the year 1754 it was still possible to write something truly revolutionary about cosmology without performing any natural scientific experiments. In 1796, Laplace proposed the Nebular Hypothesis, which virtually contained the same content and went down as celebrity in natural history because he actually was a natural scientist. As early as 1796, every one expected general theories about the cosmos to be made not so much by philosophers as by scientists, at least it was so in France and England. Not so in Germany where the ominous influence of some philosophers on scientific research was more significant especially on biology. This is the first story. 1754, an outstanding cosmology which even today is admired by contemporary physicists, written at home without experiments at all. Now comes the second story. We travel 30 years forward in time to the year 1784. Again we find a highly ambitious young man. This young man studied law and since two years he is Minister of Finance in Weimar. But he also does medical experiments - most of the time he is just watching - in the Anatomy Tower in Jena. Along with a teacher he observes skulls, human skulls. And suddenly he thinks he has found something. Something that he will be so proud of all his life so that everything that made him famous later seemed to him insufficient compared to this discovery. Then beneath his Theory of Colours, Goethe believed that his discovery of the Intermaxillary Bone was his greatest scientific achievement. The problem with this story is that four years before Goethe the French physician Vicq d' Azyr had written a detailed treaty about the Intermaxillary Bone. Why do I tell you these two stories? There is a clear explanation: both stories are separated by 30 years. Certainly, luck and chance do play a role here. Certainly it also plays a role that Kant had a different temperament than Goethe, and perhaps he was even more careful with what he did and maybe he hit the target when he was shooting in the dark instead of doing speculative talk... But this is not all. I'm heading for those 30 years that passed between 1754 and 1784. Because in this time many things happened. This is actually the time when natural sciences and humanities became so distant from each other that from now on it was almost impossible for an outsider to contribute significantly to the natural sciences.

History

The concept of Geist dates back to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German idealism, in particular to Herder's and Hegel's concept of a Volksgeist, the alleged common "spirit", or rather, mind, of a people. To understand the term Geisteswissenschaften, one should bear in mind that the continental faculty of philosophy inherited the medieval faculty of arts. Besides philosophy itself it encompassed the natural sciences with mathematics as well as the philological and historical disciplines and later on psychology and the social sciences. The term Geisteswissenschaften first was used as translation of John Stuart Mill’s term “moral sciences”. The historian, philosopher and sociologist Wilhelm Dilthey popularised the term, arguing that psychology and the emerging field of sociology – like the philological and historical disciplines – should be considered as Geisteswissenschaft rather than as Naturwissenschaft (natural science), and that their methodology should reflect this classification. His arguments were very influential in the theories of the prominent German sociologist Max Weber, though Weber preferred the term Kulturwissenschaft, which has been promoted by his neokantian colleagues (Wilhelm Windelband and Heinrich Rickert).

Current use

Since the times of Dilthey it became common to speak of the Naturwissenschaften on the one hand and the Geisteswissenschaften on the other – not particularly considering the status of mathematics and of philosophy itself. After the separation of the natural sciences and mathematics into a particular faculty (in some universities not until the 1950s), the Geisteswissenschaften were left alone in the philosophical faculty and even philosophy often was subsumed under the term Geisteswissenschaften. Meanwhile, many of the German universities have split up these faculties in smaller departments, so that the old common interests and the old borders are less visible.

The term is now used irregularly. In administrative contexts it is used broadly to discuss how to organise the academic institutions and describe the culture of academic discussions, so that the faculties of Theology and Law are added to the Geisteswissenschaften. In some contexts of science policy the Geisteswissenschaften are described as non-empirical sciences, drawing them near philosophy and excluding the social sciences from their area.[1]

In the context of methodology on the contrary it has been emphasised, that Geisteswissenschaften such as history and the philological disciplines, relying on empirical data (documents, books and utterances), along with psychology and the social sciences, have a common empirical character, which is essentially based on comprehension (Verstehen) or understanding of expressions of meaning.[2]

Other authors, like Rudolf Steiner, used the term Geisteswissenschaft in a historically quite distinct sense to refer to a proposed "Science of Spirit".

Example usage

From Kulturgeschichte Frankreichs, Suchanek-Fröhlich, p. 633:[3]

Man hat Taine vorgeworfen, dass er, dessen Hauptziel die Einführung naturwissenschaftlicher Methoden in die Geisteswissenschaften war, selbst nicht induktiv, sondern deduktiv vorging.

Translation:

Some reproach Taine in that he himself, whose goal was the introduction of the methods of natural science into the Geisteswissenschaften, proceeded from methods which were not inductive but rather deductive.

References

  1. ^ Carl Friedrich Gethmann, Dieter Langewiesche, Jürgen Mittelstraß, Dieter Simon, Günter Stock, Manifest Geisteswissenschaft, ed. by Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Berlin 2005 Welche Religion braucht die Gesellschaft? Archived 2016-06-24 at the Wayback Machine.
  2. ^ Bernward Grünewald: Geist – Kultur – Gesellschaft. Versuch einer Prinzipientheorie der Geisteswissenschaften auf transzendentalphilosophischer Grundlage. Berlin: Duncker und Humblot 2009.
  3. ^ Kulturgeschichte Frankreichs Suchanek-Fröhlich, Stefan Kröner Verlag, Stuttgart, 1966

Bibliography

  • Gunter Scholz, Zwischen Wissenschaftsanspruch und Orientierungsbedürfnis. Zu Grundlage und Wandel der Geisteswissenschaften Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp 1991, ISBN 3-518-28566-1
  • Bernward Grünewald, Geist – Kultur – Gesellschaft. Versuch einer Prinzipientheorie der Geisteswissenschaften auf transzendentalphilosophischer Grundlage, Berlin, Duncker & Humblot, 2009, ISBN 978-3-428-13160-0.
  • Albrecht Behmel, Erfolgreich im Studium der Geisteswissenschaften, Francke, Tübingen 2005, ISBN 3-7720-3371-7
This page was last edited on 7 November 2023, at 23:01
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