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Why did nineteenth-century German historians and physicists habitually warn against vices that they believed philosophers in particular embodied: speculation, absence of common sense, and excessive systematizing? Sjang ten Hagen and Herman Paul answer this question in their essay, “The Icarus Flight of Speculation: Philosophers’ Vices as Perceived by Nineteenth-Century Historians and Physicists,” published in open access in a special issue of the journal Metaphilosophy. 

Project leader Herman Paul has edited a volume entitled Writing the History of the Humanities: Questions, Themes, and Approaches (2022). The volume showcases a range of perspectives from which the history of the humanities can be written. One chapter is devoted specifically to virtues and vices. Focusing on Geisteswissenschaftler in late nineteenth-century Strasbourg, it examines what virtues they cared about, what vices they warned their students against, and how these… Read More »Writing the History of the Humanities: with a chapter on virtues and vices

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… Read More »Historians’ Virtues: Open access book by Herman Paul

The latest issue of History of Humanities contains an article written in the context of the Scholarly Vices project: “Evaluating Knowledge, Evaluating Character: Book Reviewing by American Historians and Physicists (1900–1940)” by Sjang ten Hagen. Drawing on hundreds of book reviews, the article shows that categories of virtue and vice were attributed not only to authors (characters), but also to their output (books), ideas (theories), and research habits. Epistemic virtues… Read More »Evaluating Knowledge, Evaluating Character: New Article by Sjang ten Hagen

Three team members presented papers on scholarly vices in a panel at The Making of the Humanities – the annual gathering of historians of the humanities, held online this year. Sjang ten Hagen showed how historians and physicists in nineteenth-century Germany accused philosophers of speculation, to the point of “othering” philosophers into an antitype of a properly empirically oriented scientist. Herman Paul drew attention to the now almost forgotten vice… Read More »Historical Vice Epistemology: History of Humanities Meets Vice Epistemology

by Kim Hajek In early September, Anne Por (PhD candidate) and Kim Hajek (postdoc) from the Scholarly Vices Team joined forces with Maarten Derksen (University of Groningen) for a conference panel exploring the virtues and norms that shape scholars interactions with their peers. The setting was the 41st annual meeting of the European Society for the History of the Human Sciences (ESHHS) held in Berlin at the Sigmund Freud PrivatUniversität.… Read More »Not in Print: Shaping Scholarly Selves in Informal Settings

by Kim Hajek Postdocs Sjang ten Hagen and Kim Hajek from the Scholarly Vices team raised this question to a filled room of participants at the conference of the European Society for the History of Science (ESHS), held in Brussels from 7–10 September. The two co-presented their findings—developed together with project leader Herman Paul—on American scientists’ use of virtue-talk in the second half of the 20th century. If other historians… Read More »What Kind of People Make Good Scientists? Scholarly Virtues at the ESHS Conference, Brussels.

Caroline Schep (research assistant in the Scholarly Vices project from 2020 to 2022) published an article entitled “Denial of Coevalness: Charges of Dogmatism in the Nineteenth-Century Humanities.” Co-authored with Herman Paul, the article examines how and why philosophers and Biblical scholars in 1860s Germany accused each other of dogmatism. One of the study’s key findings is that dogmatism had strong connotations of backwardness: being dogmatic amounted to being old-fashioned, pre-critical,… Read More »Dogmatism in the 19th century: “Denial of Coevalness”

by Kim Hajek The Scholarly Vices Project held its first in-person workshop since the pandemic on 1 July , asking what it has meant to appeal to authorities in the history of scholarship (download programme here). Organized by PhD candidate, Edurne De Wilde, and linked to her project on the afterlives of Francis Bacon’s idols, the day saw intense discussion of the way four major figures lived on in discourse… Read More »Appealing to Authorities Workshop – 1 July

Project member Alexander Stoeger has been awarded the Lisa Jardine Research Grant of the Royal Society to exploit History of Science collections in Great Britain and exchange with experts in the field. He will spend two months at the Royal Society archives in London starting mid-May to investigate the referee reports for the Philosophical Transactions between 1831 and 1941. Afterwards, he will present his findings at the annual conference of… Read More »Lisa Jardine Research Grant awarded to Alexander Stoeger