Abstract Summary
A parallel development in the history of the sciences and the humanities was the structural organization of small-scale, practical, and method-oriented training by German university professors in the mid-nineteenth century. For several disciplines in the humanities and the sciences, historical studies exist which deal with the details of such training. So far, however, the results of these studies have hardly been brought into relation with one another. In my paper, I compare the pedagogical methods of physicists and historians in mid-nineteenth-century Berlin. My main focus lies on the schools emerging around the physicist Heinrich Gustav Magnus and the historian Leopold von Ranke. Remarkably, the most advanced exercises (Übungen) that they organized did not take place at the university, but at their private homes. In family-like settings, Magnus and Ranke developed a personal bond with their students, and established standards for the methods and scholarly persona necessary to obtain legitimate “scientific” (wissenschaftliches) knowledge. Drawing the comparison further, I argue that some of the epistemic virtues stressed by historians and physicists trained in these environments were strikingly similar. For instance, Magnus, Ranke, and their students (including Hermann von Helmholtz and Heinrich von Sybel) were all concerned about the proper relation between empirical and speculative methods. While defining this relation, they commonly referred to the importance of ‘exactitude’, ‘skill to combine’ (Kombinationsgabe), and ‘objectivity’, even though the interpretations and practices they associated with these epistemic virtues were different.
