1st Edition
Virtues and Vices in the Nineteenth-Century Humanities Explorations of a Discourse
By Herman Paul
Copyright 2025
298 Pages
by
Routledge
What do scholars do when they talk about virtues (impartiality, accuracy) or vices (dogmatism, prejudice)? Against the common view that such high-minded talk is largely irrelevant to actual scholarly practice, this volume proposes to treat it as a practice in its own right. Drawing on case studies from the nineteenth-century humanities (with occasional forays into physics, chemistry, and... Read more
Introduction: A Rhetorical Approach to Scholarly Virtues and Vices, Part I: Across Disciplines, 1. The Scholarly Self: Ideals of Intellectual Virtue in Nineteenth-Century Leiden, 2. Weber, Wöhler, and Waitz: Virtue Language in Late Nineteenth-Century Physics, Chemistry, and History, 3. An Ethos of Criticism: Virtues and Vices in Nineteenth-Century Strasbourg, Part II: Rhetorical Uses, 4. Hypercriticism: A Case Study in the Rhetoric of Vice, 5. Denial of Coevalness: Charges of Dogmatism in the Nineteenth-Century Humanities (with Caroline Schep), 6. Virtue Language in Nineteenth-Century Orientalism: A Case Study in Historical Epistemology, Part III: Cultural Repertoires, 7. German Thoroughness in Baltimore: Epistemic Virtues and National Stereotypes, 8. The Icarus Flight of Speculation: Philosophers' Vices as Perceived by Nineteenth-Century Historians and Physicists (with Sjang ten Hagen), 9. Labor ipse voluptas: Virtues of Work in Nineteenth-Century Germany, Acknowledgments, Index
Biography
Herman Paul is Professor of the History of the Humanities at Leiden University. He is the author, most recently, of Historians’ Virtues: From Antiquity to the Twenty-First Century (2022) and Dogmatism: On the History of a Scholarly Vice (with Alexander Stoeger, 2024). In 2024, he was elected a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW).
