ABSTRACT
Why did nineteenth-century historians and physicists habitually warn against vices that they believed philosophers in particular to embody: speculation, absence of common sense, and excessive systematizing? This chapter interprets this “vice-charging” as a rhetorical practice aimed at delineating empirical research from Naturphilosophie and Geschichtsphilosophie as practiced in the heyday of German Idealism. For empiricist scholars committed to virtues like precision, thoroughness, and conscientiousness, the straw man of “the philosopher” represented everything they rejected. Consequently, in their historical narratives, historians and physicists consistently depicted philosophy either as a relic from the past or as a phase that they had virtuously left behind.
