Denise Phillips

Epistemological Distinctions and Cultural Politics: Educational Reform and the Naturwissenschaft/Geisteswissenschaft Distinction in Nineteenth-Century Germany

The Erklaren/Verstehen debates of the late nineteenth century were, as several essays in this collection point out, peculiar to German-speaking Europe. Even when French or British scholars dealt with similar philosophical arguments, an epistemological distinction between two kinds of knowledge - one about human beings and texts, the other about the natural world - never took on the ubiquity or importance that it held in the German context (see Smith and Schmaus, in this volume). Why was this the case? What about the German intellectual scene made the issue of methodological differences between the sciences such an important theme in the second half of the nineteenth century?

Francis Bacon and the Germans: Stories from when ‘science’ meant ‘Wissenschaft’

Given that translation is always an imperfect process, why do people single out certain words as simply untranslatable? This article looks at one such supposedly untranslatable term, the German word Wissenschaft. Rather than take the word’s status as a given, it examines the historical processes through which Wissenschaft came to be seen as a word impossible to render into English. The article examines a mid-nineteenth century debate about Francis Bacon to show that as late as the 1860s “science” and “Wissenschaft” were still treated as comparable terms. Wissenschaft began to seem untranslatable only later in the nineteenth century, as part of a critique that set German national character in opposition to the supposedly shallow materialism of the British. After this initial divergence, scholars in the twentieth century continued to elaborate on the difference between the terms, with lasting implications for our retrospective understandings of nineteenth-century intellectual life.

Experimentation in the agricultural EnlightenmentPlace, profit and norms of knowledge-making in eighteenth-century Germany

Most research into history of eighteenth-century experimentation has focused on the instrument-based traditions of natural philosophers and chemists. This article explores an alternate, but related, tradition: the experiments carried out by agricultural improvers. While authors interested in improving farming were aware of natural philosophical practices, they self-consciously devised different strategies in their own forms of experimentation. Experiments in the chemical and physical sciences generally sought to find universal laws operative everywhere; agricultural experimentation often explored the particular possibilities of a given place. The cost and likely economic success of an experiment was also worked explicitly into its design.

Trading Epistemological Insults: “Positive Knowledge” and Natural Science in Germany, 1800–1850

Historians have often described the rise of a “positivist natural science” as a defining feature of mid-nineteenth century German culture. This chapter argues, however, that “positivist” was not in fact a label that mid-nineteenth-century German scientists claimed for themselves. Indeed, the word was initially far more likely to be assigned to the natural sciences as an insult rather than as praise. In the German intellectual tradition, “positive knowledge” was a concept originally used in law and theology, not in natural science. The concept came to be associated with the natural sciences during a set of contentious debates over educational reform in the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s; in these debates, “positive” knowledge was devalued and seen as potentially dangerous to the education of elite young men.

Plants and Places: Agricultural Knowledge and Plant Geography in Germany, 1750–1810

This chapter explores the role that agricultural debates played in the development of plant geography in the decades preceding 1810. Focusing on German-speaking Central Europe, it looks at how eighteenth-century interest in new crops and garden plants raised practical questions about how easily plants could be transposed between different settings. Such questions received extensive attention within a large literature on practical agricultural improvement, and for learned men who wanted to promote natural history’s utility to agriculture, these concerns provided an attractive opening. The science of botany, a number of authors began to claim, could help landowners anticipate which plants might be grown successfully on their estates. It was in part this broader backdrop of regional, practical concerns that made geographical issues loom so large in the botanical literature of the early nineteenth century.