Virtues as a Lens: Exploring Science, Scholarship, and Politics under Soviet Domination
Reflects on how to use virtues as a lens in historical research, i.e., to ask what virtues underpin scholarly and political discourses and practices.
Tagged: academic cultures
Styles of Reasoning and the History of Knowledge
The author presents his book, which constitutes an analytical account of Ian Hacking’s styles of reasoning project and explores its philosophical implications.
Owning the (Deep) Past: Paleontological Knowledge and the Political Afterlives of Fossils
Who do fossils belong to? The question is far from new: in various guises, it has preoccupied paleoscientists, museum curators, and occasionally officials for many years, although ongoing debates about the decolonization of science and natural history collections have renewed its significance.
Doing Area Studies: Present and Future Perspectives on the History of Latin American Studies at Freie Universität Berlin
From Interest in Latin America to Contested Latin American Studies Research on Latin America has long been a tradition in Germany and especially in Berlin, with interest dating back to Alexander von Humboldt’s expeditions...
Knowledge Notes
Occasional notes on calls, events, publications, and more that caught our attention.
‘Humboldt and the Modern German University’
Johan Östling’s Humboldt and the Modern German University has been translated from Swedish into English. Even better, this Lund University Press publication is OpenAccess and can be downloaded as a PDF.
From the abstract:
By combining approaches from intellectual history, conceptual history and the history of knowledge, the study investigates the ways in which Humboldt’s ideas have been appropriated for various purposes in different historical contexts and epochs. Ultimately, it shows that Humboldt’s ideals are not timeless—they are historical phenomena and have always been determined by the predicaments and issues of the day.
Negotiating and Communicating Evidence: Lessons from the Anthropocene Debate
Skepticism and debate are always welcome and are critically important to the advancement of science. . . . Skepticism that fails to account for evidence is no virtue.
The executive director of the American Meteorological Society, Keith Seitter, made this distinction about skepticism in his letter to the U.S. Secretary of the Department of Energy, Rick Perry, on June 21, 2017.… Continue reading
Race, Gender, Respectability, and Knowledge
The stimulating blog Black Perspectives has published an online roundtable on Black Women and the Politics of Respectability that includes two posts clearly relevant to the history of knowledge. Instead of exploring the link...
The ‘Academic Nachwuchs’ Label in Germany
Ein Forscher, eine Forscherin ist meines Erachtens mit Abschluss der Promotion wissenschaftlich mündig.
After earning a PhD, a scholar has, in my opinion, reached academic adulthood.
I have only ever heard the German term Nachwuchs in an academic context, which I understood to be a label for people rather junior in the profession, “trainees” or “young ones,” if you will. The word sounds … Continue reading
Organizing and Communicating Historical Knowledge: Some Personal Observations
In my initial academic encounters with Germany in the late 1980s and early 1990s, one of the things that impressed me was the availability of handbooks as well as specialized encyclopedias such as Geschichtliche...
