This workshop sets at its core the scientific, the philological, and the modern: in their contours, connections, and contingencies. Posed as a question, it asks what, exactly, was so ‘modern’ or ‘scientific’ about philology after 1800. Critically, it does so on two levels: as conceived by those moderns themselves and as viewed by contemporary historians. To examine the construction of philology as a modern science, this collaborative undertaking focuses not only on its making or unmaking but also on its reverberations elsewhere. The contributions thus investigate (a) how philology became, was, or ceased to be conceptualized as scientific or even as a science all its own, (b) how its epistemic status rose and fell in relation to other fields, and (c) how that standing impacted not only its own development but also that of other sciences, whether physical or life, social or human.
Organisers: Kristine Palmieri and Paul Michael Kurtz
PROGRAMME
Magdalena Gronau & Martin Gronau (Berlin) – Physicists as Philologists: Philological Encounters in the World of Modern Atomic Physics
Paul Kurtz (Ghent) – Rock, Paper, Stratum: Cognitive Metaphors between Philology and Geology
Josephine Musil-Gutsch (Erlangen) – ‘Who are We to Fight the Alchemist? When Assyriology and History of Chemistry Collaborated
Judy Kaplan (Philadelphia) – The Berlin Turfan Collection at the Crossroads of Manuscript and Museum
Kristine Palmieri (Halle) – Philology Encounters (Real)Politik: Pedagogical Practices, Institutional Authority, and Cultural Cachet in the German Research University
Herman Paul (Leiden) – Classical Philology and Historical Scholarship: A Story of Entanglements and Estrangements
Ian Stewart (Edinburgh) – Celtic Philology, French Nationalism, and Science in the German Shadow, 1868–1932
Céline Trautmann-Waller (Paris) – Source and Soul, Mind and Matter: Philology and Psychology between Germany and America
Floris Solleveld (Bristol) – The Philologization of Missionary Linguistics
Glenn Most (Pisa) – Retrospect & Prospect
