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Since the seventeenth century, scholars have been accusing each other of ‘dogmatism’. But what exactly did this mean? In exploring this question, this article focuses on philosophy and Biblical sch...

Does the death of Hayden White mark the end of an era in philosophy of history? Although White’s personal presence is sorely missed, White’s work is unlikely soon to lose its prominent position in philosophy of history. This is because no other author occupies a position in the field that is remotely as central as White’s. His oeuvre serves as a shared reference point for scholars working on issues ranging from explanation and representation to deconstruction and presence. From whatever school or persuasion they are, philosophers of history relate to White’s work, either by building upon it or by dissociating themselves from it. In explaining this unique position of White’s work, this essay reflects as much on the field called philosophy of history as on White’s interventions in it. It argues that philosophy of history is not a discipline in a recognizable sense of the word, but a loosely knit network of scholars working on different “questions about history.” Only when this network status of the field is taken into account, it becomes possible to see why White’s work has such a central place in current philosophy of history.

This article seeks to advance historians’ understanding of epistemic virtues in the history of historiography. Drawing on a nineteenth-century case study, it argues that virtues were often multi-layered in the sense of being charged with multiple meanings. Loyalty (Treue) is a case in point: it was, to some extent, an epistemic virtue, but simultaneously also a political virtue with conservative overtones. Loyalty served as a key concept in an idealized image that nationalistic historians and literary scholars held of the ancient Germans. Moreover, as a civic virtue, loyalty was bound up with social codes that obliged students to be loyal to their teachers – which could lead to frictions if these teachers were associated with all too pronounced views of the discipline. On this basis, the article concludes that the phrase “epistemic virtues” should be used with caution. The adjective denotes an epistemic layer of meaning which can be distinguished but never separated from social, moral, and political layers of meaning. Este artigo busca promover a compreensão dos historiadores sobre as virtudes epistêmicas na História da Historiografia. Refletindo sobre um estudo de caso do século XIX, o artigo argumenta que as virtudes frequentemente possuíam múltiplas camadas, no sentido de serem carregadas com múltiplos significados. A lealdade (Treue) é um caso em questão: ela era, em certa medida, uma virtude epistêmica, mas simultaneamente também uma virtude política com conotações conservadoras. A lealdade servia como um conceito-chave em uma imagem idealizada que historiadores nacionalistas e estudiosos da literatura mantinham dos antigos germânicos. Além disso, sendo uma virtude cívica, a lealdade estava ligada a códigos sociais que obrigavam os estudantes a serem leais com seus professores – o que poderia levar a atritos se esses professores fossem associados com as visões demasiadamente pronunciadas da disciplina. Nesse sentido, o artigo conclui que a expressão “virtudes epistêmicas” deve ser usada com cautela. O adjetivo denota uma camada epistêmica de significado, que pode ser distinguida, mas jamais separada das camadas de significado sociais, morais e políticas.

Historical epistemology is a form of intellectual history focused on “the history of categories that structure our thought, pattern our arguments and proofs, and certify our standards for explanation” (Lorraine Daston). Under this umbrella, historians have been studying the changing meanings of “objectivity,” “impartiality,” “curiosity,” and other virtues believed to be conducive to good scholarship. While endorsing this historicization of virtues and their corresponding vices, the present article argues that the meaning and relative importance of these virtues and vices can only be determined if their mutual dependencies are taken into account. Drawing on a detailed case study—a controversy that erupted among nineteenth-century orientalists over the publication of R. P. A. Dozy'sDe Israëlieten te Mekka(The Israelites in Mecca) (1864)—the paper shows that nineteenth-century orientalists were careful to examine (1) the degree to which Dozy practiced the virtues they considered most important, (2) the extent to which these virtues were kept in balance by other ones, (3) the extent to which these virtues were balanced by other scholars’ virtues, and (4) the extent to which they were expected to be balanced by future scholars’ work. Consequently, this article argues that historical epistemology might want to abandon its single-virtue focus in order to allow balances, hierarchies, and other dependency relations between virtues and vices to move to the center of attention.

Recent literature on the moral economy of nineteenth-century German historiography shares with older scholarship on Leopold von Ranke's methodological revolution a tendency to refer to “the” historical discipline in the third person singular. This would make sense as long as historians occupied a common professional space and/or shared a basic understanding of what it meant to be a historian. Yet, as this article demonstrates, in a world sharply divided over political and religious issues, historians found it difficult to agree on what it meant to be a good historian. Drawing on the case of Ranke's influential pupil Georg Waitz, whose death in 1886 occasioned a debate on the relative merits of the example that Waitz had embodied, this article argues that historians in early imperial Germany were considerably more divided over what they called “the virtues of the historian” than has been acknowledged to date. Their most important frame of reference was not a shared discipline but rather a variety of approaches corresponding to a diversity of models or examples (“scholarly personae,” in modern academic parlance), the defining features of which were often starkly contrasted. Although common ground beneath these disagreements was not entirely absent, the habit of late nineteenth-century German historians to position themselves between Waitz and Heinrich von Sybel, Ranke and Friedrich Christoph Dahlmann, or other pairs of proper names turned into models of virtue, suggests that these historians experienced their professional environment as characterized primarily by disagreement over the marks of a good historian.

When historians claim to maintain a “dialogue with the past,” this metaphor is usually interpreted in epistemological terms. Although this is not necessarily wrong, the present article presents a broader reading of the metaphor by arguing that the imperative to engage in “dialogue with the past” can be understood as an ethical claim to scholarly integrity. This argument proceeds from the assumption that historians are usually engaged in multiple “relations with the past” as well as in multiple relations with present-day instances, varying from colleagues and readers to publishers and university administrators. These different relations, in turn, can be seen at least in part as corresponding to a range of different I-positions, some of which tend more towards the monologic than towards the dialogic. Maintaining a dialogue with the past, then, means that the I-position of what this article calls an “inquisitive listener,” characterized by dialogic virtues such as curiosity, imagination, openness, attentiveness, and humility, is cultivated and, if necessary, protected against other, more dominant I-positions, such as the “ground-breaking scholar” and the “best-selling author.” In sum, this article reinterprets the metaphor of a dialogue with the past to such effect that historians are encouraged to critical self-reflection: how dominant or recessive are their respective I-positions and to what extent should they, for integrity’s sake, be challenged or supported?

What is the problem that “epistemic virtues” seek to solve? This article argues that virtues, epistemic and otherwise, are the key characteristics of “scholarly personae,” that is, of ideal-typical models of what it takes to be a scholar. Different scholarly personae are characterized by different constellations of virtues and skills or, more precisely, by different constellations of commitments to goods (epistemic, moral, political, and so forth), the pursuit of which requires the exercise of certain virtues and skills. Expanding Hayden White's notion of “historiographical styles” so as to encompass not only historians' writings, but also their nontextual “doings,” the article argues that different styles of “being a historian”—a meticulous archival researcher, an inspired feminist scholar, or an outstanding undergraduate teacher—can be analyzed productively in terms of virtues and skills. Finally, the article claims that virtues and skills, in turn, are rooted in desires, which are shaped by the examples of others as well as by promises of reward. This makes the scholarly persona not merely a useful concept for distinguishing among different types of historians, but also a critical tool for analyzing why certain models of “being a historian” gain in popularity, whereas others become “old-fashioned.”

How has historical research on secularization evolved over the past half century? Focusing on British contributions, this article distinguishes three phases: (1) approval of ‘secularization’ as a useful analytical concept, (2) criticism of the secularization paradigm on empirical and methodological grounds, and (3) historicization of secularization as a mid-twentieth-century master narrative. Because all three phases focus on the production of secularization narratives, this article advocates a fourth research phase, focused on the consumption or circulation of secularization narratives, especially outside the academic realm. With reference to the Sheffield Industrial Mission in the 1950s and 1960s, the article argues that secularization narratives not only have a referential dimension, but also a performative aspect. They not only explain the changing roles and functions of religion in modern societies, but also contribute to such changes, if only by providing frameworks through which people interpret their world. Accordingly, if historians want to explain why in the 1950s the Sheffield Industrial Mission called for radical transformation of ecclesiastical structures, or why in the 1960s staff members of the Mission disagreed on the course of action appropriate for communicating the gospel in a ‘secular’ environment, it is the use and impact of secularization narratives that has to be taken into account.

The archival turn in 19th-century historical scholarship – that is, the growing tendency among 19th-century historians to equate professional historical studies with scholarship based on archival research – not only affected the profession’s epistemological assumptions and day-to-day working manners, but also changed the persona of the historian. Archival research required the cultivation and exercise of such dispositions, virtues, or character traits as carefulness, meticulousness, diligence and industry. This article shows that a growing significance attached to these qualities made the archival turn increasingly contested. As the case of the German-Austrian historian Theodor von Sickel and his critics shows, it was not the necessity of archival research as such on which historians in late 19th-century Europe came to hold different views. Sickel’s critics were rather concerned about the potentially detrimental effects that the increasingly philological ethos of archival studies could have on the historian’s character. What was primarily at stake in late 19th-century debates on the gains and losses of increased commitments to archival study was the persona of the historian – his character traits, his dispositions and the virtues and skills in which he excelled.

This paper compares the occurrence and use of virtue language among physicists, chemists, and historians in late nineteenth-century Germany, with a special focus on obituaries written for the Gottingen professors Wilhelm Weber, Friedrich Wohler, and Georg Waitz. Although virtue language was far more prevalent in Waitz’s necrologies than in those commemorating Wohler and Weber, historians, chemists, and physicists resembled each other in that they invoked epistemic virtues if and only if they felt that defining features of what it took to be a scholar were at stake. For all of them, epistemic virtues were shorthand for scholarly personae that they invoked at moments when they perceived those personae as being under pressure. More concretely, categories of virtue and vice served as means for taking sides in debates about such fundamental issues as the proper relation between academy and industry or the relative importance of source criticism in relation to writing – aspects of scientific work that made different demands on scientists in terms of the virtues or dispositions they required.

What did it mean for eighteen- to twenty-year-old men and women in the nineteenth-century Netherlands to be confirmed—that is, to sit in the front row of the church, dressed in Sunday dress, and be accepted into full church membership? Previous scholarship on confirmation in the Netherlands Reformed Church has mostly focused on theological controversies surrounding the wording of the so-called confirmation questions (three questions about Christian doctrine and morals that confirmants had to answer during the service), treating these controversies as markers of growing struggles between ‘wings’ or ‘parties’ in nineteenth-century Dutch Protestantism. Important as these theological controversies were, this article nonetheless approaches confirmation from a different, less frequently explored angle, arguing that confirmation was also, and perhaps especially, a social rite of passage, which symbolically marked transition into a new stage of life, with adult responsibilities in church and society. Drawing on a rich array of published as well as unpublished sources (sermons, booklets, letters, and diaries), the article examines what kind of meanings were associated with this rite of passage, by both clergy and confirmants, and to what extent these meanings changed over the course of the century. It shows that Protestants throughout the nineteenth century tried to hold together, in one way or another, what one may call the ‘inward’ and the ‘outward’ aspects of the ritual (expressions of personal conviction and conformation to societal standards of morality). Although they insisted that professions of faith must be made “from the bottom of the heart,” they simultaneously equated confirmation with a promise to a virtuous life. Also, while accepting sighs and tears as testifying to the sincerity of a confirmant’s profession, many authors explicitly warned against strong emotions that could carry newly confirmed church members away from the narrow path of virtue.

Este artigo busca reconciliar a sensibilidade historicista em relação à forma como o comportamento intelectualmente virtuoso é moldado por contextos históricos, de um lado, e uma abordagem não-relativista da pesquisa histórica acadêmica do outro. Para tanto, distingue-se entre hierarquias de virtudes intelectuais e hierarquias de metas intelectuais. A primeira hierarquia rejeita um modelo único de virtuosidade histórica em favor de um modelo que permite significativas variações no peso relativo que os historiadores atribuem às virtudes intelectuais, de modo a obter conhecimento histórico fundamentado. Esta hierarquia situa as bases para tais diferenças não nas preferências ou interesses dos historiadores, mas nas suas situações historiográficas, de maneira que as hierarquias de virtudes são uma função das demandas feitas pelas situações historiográficas (definidas como o intercâmbio de gênero, questões de pesquisa, e estado da arte). Da mesma maneira, a segunda hierarquia concede espaço para que sejam perseguidas várias metas intelectuais, mas afasta o espectro do relativismo ao tratar a compreensão histórica como uma meta intelectual fundamental para a pesquisa histórica e que, por consequência, merece prioridade diante de metas alternativas. A posição daí emergente é classificada como uma forma de historicismo fraco.

This article seeks to reconcile a historicist sensitivity to how intellectually virtuous behavior is shaped by historical contexts with a non-relativist account of historical scholarship. To that end, it distinguishes between hierarchies of intellectual virtues and hierarchies of intellectual goods. The first hierarchy rejects a one-size-fits-all model of historical virtuousness in favor of a model that allows for significant varieties between the relative weight that historians must assign to intellectual virtues in order to acquire justified historical understanding. It grounds such differences, not on the historians’ interests or preferences, but on their historiographical situations, so that hierarchies of virtues are a function of the demands that historiographical situations (defined as interplays of genre, research question, and state of scholarship) make upon historians. Likewise, the second hierarchy allows for the pursuit of various intellectual goods, but banishes the specter of relativism by treating historical understanding as an intellectual good that is constitutive of historical scholarship and therefore deserves priority over alternative goods. The position that emerges from this is classified as a form of weak historicism. Este artigo busca reconciliar a sensibilidade historicista em relação à forma como o comportamento intelectualmente virtuoso é moldado por contextos históricos, de um lado, e uma abordagem não-relativista da pesquisa histórica acadêmica do outro. Para tanto, distingue-se entre hierarquias de virtudes intelectuais e hierarquias de metas intelectuais. A primeira hierarquia rejeita um modelo único de virtuosidade histórica em favor de um modelo que permite significativas variações no peso relativo que os historiadores atribuem às virtudes intelectuais, de modo a obter conhecimento histórico fundamentado. Esta hierarquia situa as bases para tais diferenças não nas preferências ou interesses dos historiadores, mas nas suas situações historiográficas, de maneira que as hierarquias de virtudes são uma função das demandas feitas pelas situações historiográficas (definidas como o intercâmbio de gênero, questões de pesquisa, e estado da arte). Da mesma maneira, a segunda hierarquia concede espaço para que sejam perseguidas várias metas intelectuais, mas afasta o espectro do relativismo ao tratar a compreensão histórica como uma meta intelectual fundamental para a pesquisa histórica e que, por consequência, merece prioridade diante de metas alternativas. A posição daí emergente é classificada como uma forma de historicismo fraco.

Abstract In response to Anton Froeyman’s paper, “Virtues of Historiography,” this article argues that philosophers of history interested in why historians cherish such virtues as carefulness, impartiality, and intellectual courage would do wise not to classify these virtues unequivocally as either epistemic or moral virtues. Likewise, in trying to grasp the roles that virtues play in the historian’s professional practice, philosophers of history would be best advised to avoid adopting either an epistemological or an ethical perspective. Assuming that the historian’s virtuous behavior has epistemic and moral dimensions (as well as aesthetic, political, and other dimensions), this article advocates a non-reductionist account of historical scholarship, which acknowledges that the virtues cherished by historians usually play a variety of roles, depending on the goals they are supposed to serve. Given that not the least important of these goals are epistemic ones, the articles concludes that virtue ethical approaches, to the extent that they are focused on the acquisition of moral instead of epistemic goods, insufficiently recognize the role of virtue in the pursuit of such epistemic aims as knowledge and understanding.

What did “historical distance” mean to historians in the Rankean tradition? Although historical distance is often equated with temporal distance, an analysis of Ernst Bernheim's Lehrbuch der historischen Methode reveals that for German historians around 1900 distance did not primarily refer to a passage of time that would enable scholars to study remote pasts from retrospective points of view. If Bernheim's manual presents historical distance as a prerequisite for historical interpretation, the metaphor rather conveys a need for self-distanciation. Self-distanciation is not a Romantic desire to “extinguish” oneself, but a virtuous attempt to put one's own ideas and intuitions about the working of the world between brackets in the study of people who might have understood the world in different terms. Although Bernheim did not explicitly talk about virtue, the article shows that his Lehrbuch nonetheless considers self-distanciation a matter of virtuous behavior, targeted at an aim that may not be fully realizable, but ought to be pursued with all possible vigor. For Bernheim, then, distance requires epistemological virtue, which in turn calls for intellectual character, or what Bernheim's generation considered scholarly selfhood (wissen-schaftliche Personlichkeit). Not a mapping of time onto space, but a strenuous effort to mold “scholarly characters,” truly able to recognize the otherness of the past, appears to be characteristic of Bernheim's view of historical distance.

Philosophers of history in the past few decades have been predominantly interested in issues of explanation and narrative discourse. Consequently, they have focused consistently and almost exclusively on the historian's (published) output, thereby ignoring that historical scholarship is a practice of reading, thinking, discussing, and writing, in which successful performance requires active cultivation of certain skills, attitudes, and virtues. This paper, then, suggests a new agenda for philosophy of history. Inspired by a “performative turn” in the history and philosophy of science, it focuses on the historian's “doings” and proposes to analyze these performances in terms of epistemic virtue. It argues that historical scholarship is embedded in “practices” or “epistemic cultures,” in which knowledge is created and warranted by means of such virtues as honesty, carefulness, accuracy, and balance. These epistemic virtues, however, are not etched in stone: historians may highlight some of them, exchange one for another, or reinterpret their meaning. On the one hand, this suggests a rich area of research for historians of historiography. To what extent can consensus, conflict, continuity, and change in historical scholarship be explained in terms of epistemic virtue? On the other hand, the proposal outlined in this article raises a couple of philosophical questions. For example, on what grounds can historians choose among epistemic virtues? And what concept of the self comes with the notion of virtue? In addressing these questions, philosophy of history may expand its current scope so as to encompass not only “writings” but also “doings,” that is, the virtuous performances historians recognize as professional conduct.

Abstract: Ever since the sixteenth century, John Calvin has been remembered and commemorated in the context of what scholars call “collective memory cultures.” But what exactly was collective about such collective memories? With examples drawn from Dutch neo-Calvinism, this article shows that Calvin representations brought in circulation by high-profile “memory managers,” such as Abraham Kuyper, were not always appropriated as intended. In fact, in a number of autobiographies and other ego-documents written by non-elite members of Kuyper's neo-Calvinism, the name of the Reformer is even entirely absent. This suggests, first, that scholars must be sensitive to how individuals appropriated Calvin, how they challenged and changed the repertoires of Calvin images, and how they related their memories to each other. Second, it suggests that, despite all neo-Calvinist rhetoric, Calvin may have played a less important role in how Kuyper's followers understood themselves than the politician and church leader himself might have wished.

As unlikely as it would have sounded a generation ago, historians of modern Europe have rediscovered religion.1 Apart from being increasingly attentive to the various social, cultural and intellectual roles played by its so-called ‘traditional religions’ (Judaism, Christianity and Islam),2 growing numbers of historians employ ‘religion’ as a key concept in the study of phenomena not conventionally associated with religion. Thus we hear about the ‘religion of nature’ practiced by eighteenth-century travellers and writers who perceived an unspoiled wood or wilderness as reaching beyond itself3 or about the ‘religion of history’ professed by those nineteenth-century historicists who believed that historical inquiry would tell them who they were by showing where they came from.4 We are told about a ‘religion of science’ that made its appearance among nineteenth-century scientific entrepreneurs and, in rather different form, entered school books in the atheistic German Democratic Republic.5 Likewise, in the field of political history, we find scholars discussing ‘liberal religion’, the ‘religion of socialism’ and, most notably, ‘political religion’.6 Perhaps Stanley Fish was right after all to predict a couple of years ago that religion would succeed ‘high theory and the triumvirate of race, gender and class as the centre of intellectual energy in the academy’.7

What does "historical distance" mean? Starting with Johan Huizinga, the famous Dutch historian who refused to lecture on contemporary history, this introductory article argues that "historical distance" is a metaphor used in a variety of intellectual contexts. Accordingly, the metaphor has ontological, epistemological, moral, aesthetic, as well as methodological connotations. This implies that historical distance cannot be reduced to a single "problem" or "concept." At the same time, this wide variety of meanings associated with distance helps explain why an easily recognizable tradition of scholarly reflection on historical distance does not exist. In a broad survey of nineteenth-and twentieth-century historical theory, this article nonetheless attempts to show that distance has been a major, if seldom explicitly articulated, theme in European and American philosophy of history. In doing so, it pays special attention to those few authors who in recent years have taken up the metaphor for critical study. Finally, the paper summarizes some of the main arguments put forward in the articles comprising this issue on historical distance.

Model and Predecessor: Robert Fruin and Godefroid Kurth as Fathers of Historical ScholarshipThis article explores not how historians study collective memories, but how they create and nourish (professional) memory cultures of their own. It examines how historians commemorate their predecessors and celebrate their historiographical achievements. The case studies chosen are Robert Fruin (1823-1899) and Godefroid Kurth (1847-1916), both of whom were hailed as ‘father of history’ by Dutch and Belgian admirers, respectively, in the late nineteenth century. Tracing the fortunes of Fruin’s and Kurth’s reputations throughout the twentieth century, the article shows that this ‘father of history’ metaphor acquired rather diverse meanings. These shifting meanings not only mirrored changing ideals of scholarly practice, but also reflected institutional concerns, religious or ideological partisanship, and growing concerns over the habit of conceiving of historical scholarship in national terms. Finally, the article recommends further research on the affective and emotional dimensions of fatherhood in nineteenth and twentieth-century historiography.

In a critical piece on the French intellectual, Jacques Ellul, the American theology professor George S. Hendry once observed that Ellul was not the first French Protestant who had been trained as a lawyer, but increasingly received acclaim as an author on theological subjects. John Calvin, the University of Paris graduate known as the Reformer of Geneva, had made such a career shift already in the sixteenth century. This book examines how John Calvin was perceived, remembered, represented, constructed, and manipulated by advocates and adversaries alike. It is a study of Calvin representations and the use that was made of them by church leaders, politicians, and popular authors. Likewise, the chapters in this book deliberately focuses on representations of the person John Calvin, as distinguished from the theological tradition, church family, worldview or ethos called Calvinism. Keywords: calvinism; french protestant; John Calvin; sixteenth century; theological tradition

This essay redefines the crisis of historicism as a collapse of trust. Following Friedrich Jaeger, it suggests that this crisis should be understood, not as a crisis caused by historicist methods, but as a crisis faced by the classical historicist tradition of Ranke. The "nihilism" and "moral relativism" feared by Troeltsch's generation did not primarily refer to the view that moral universals did not exist; rather, they expressed that the historical justification of bildungsbürgerliche values offered by classical historicism did no longer work. In Niklas Luhmann's vocabulary, this is to say that moral values could no longer be trusted on historical grounds. But when the "reduction of complexity" offered by classical historicism collapsed, Troeltsch's generation faced a justification problem: what other modes of justification, if any at all, were available in a time of increasing secularization and growing feelings of discontinuity with the past? In identifying the crisis of historicism with this moral justification problem, this essay helps explain why such debts of despair could be reached in the early-twentieth-century disputes over historicism.