Denial of Coevalness : Charges of Dogmatism in the Nineteenth-Century Humanities

What did it mean for scholars to be accused of dogmatism? In exploring this question, the chapter focuses on philosophy and Biblical scholarship in nineteenth-century Germany. Textbooks in both fields offered teleological narratives of dogmatic belief having given way to critical thinking. This template, in turn, allowed for a specific type of vice-charging. When neo-Kantian philosophers and liberal Protestant theologians accused their opponents of dogmatic thinking habits, this implied that the accused clung to outdated modes of thought. This chapter argues that such temporal connotations were inherent to the vice of dogmatism. Accusations of dogmatism amounted to a “denial of coevalness,” as Johannes Fabian calls it: a “temporal othering” that relegated opponents to a stage from which modern Wissenschaft had long emancipated itself.