Making the Humanities Scientific

During the nineteenth century we witness an extraordinary progress and increasing specialization in the natural sciences as well as the growth and professionalization of universities in Germany. ¹ At the same time, after the deaths of Goethe and Hegel, the epoch of Romanticism and German Idealism had come to an end. ² While the sciences diversified and emancipated from their philosophical past, philosophy itself fragmented into competing schools and currents, ³ and in many respects, precipitated into an existential crisis. ⁴ For a long time in the mainstream historiography of philosophy the nineteenth century was considered to harbor only epigones or predecessors. ⁵ However, there certainly were central questions specific to the development of philosophy and the humanities in the nineteenth century: What makes science science? What would make philosophy science? What is or should be the relation between the natural sciences and the humanities, the Natur- and the Geisteswissenschaften? The scientific status of philosophy became a mainstream issue at first in nineteenth-century philosophy ⁶ and concerned the demarcation of academic and institutional fields as well as the fundamental nature of scientific knowledge as such. Many prominent philosophers and psychologists now argued that philosophy needed to become scientific by taking the natural sciences as a model, ⁷ while before the nineteenth century philosophy in general had been regarded as universal science and the sum of all knowledge. During the nineteenth century, scientists did no longer consider themselves to be philosophers and few, if any, philosophers could claim to be able to embrace the depth and breadth of the former ‘natural philosophy’. There certainly had been debates about the precise subject, method and demarcation of specific subdisciplines prior to the nineteenth century, but these were still considered as internal to philosophy as an encompassing whole, as the overarching quest for knowledge. Before the nineteenth century, few felt the need to articulate the relation between philosophy and science as if these were two independent enterprises or to argue that philosophy would need to become more scientific. Indeed, prior to the nineteenth century most empirical and experimental scientific research was considered to be part of philosophy. ⁸ If philosophy was inspired by any models of rigorous science outside itself, those were geometry and mathematics rather than physics or chemistry.