On 15 October 1959, Rudolf Carnap, a leading member of the recently founded Vienna Circle, came to lecture at the Bauhaus in Dessau, southwest of Berlin. Carnap had just finished his magnum opus, The Logical Construction of the World, a book that immediately became the bible of the new antiphilosophy announced by the logical positivists. From a small group in Vienna, the movement soon expanded to include an international following, and in the sixty years since has exerted a (...) powerful sway over the conduct of the philosophy of science as well as over wide branches of philosophy, economics, psychology, and physics. The site of Carnap’s lecture that day, the Dessau Bauhaus, was a stunning building designed by Walter Gropius and dedicated just three years earlier. Protected by its flat roof and glass walls, the artists, architects, weavers, and furniture designers had made the school a citadel of high modernism. It was here that Carnap addressed an enthusiastic audience on “Science and Life.” “I work in science,” he began, “and you in visible forms; the two are only different sides of a single life.”1 In this paper I will explore this “single life” of which the new philosophy and the new art were to be different facets; in the process, I hope to cast light on the shared modernist impulses that drove both disciplines in the interwar years. 1. Rudolf Carnap, lecture notes for his Bauhaus lecture, “Wissenschaft und Leben,” prepared 1 Oct. 1929 and delivered 15 Oct. 1929, transcription from shorthand by Gerald Heverly, Carnap Papers in the Archives of Scientific Philosophy, University of Pittsburgh Libraries, University of Pittsburgh , document RC 110-07-49. Quoted by permission of the University of Pittsburgh. All rights reserved. Translations are my own unless otherwise noted. Peter Galison is associate professor in the departments of philosophy and physics at Stanford University, where he co-chairs the program in the history of science. His primary interest is in the history and philosophy of experimentation, the subject of his How Experiments End and Big Science: The Growth of Large-Scale Research, edited with Bruce Hevly . His current project is entitled Image and Logic: The Material Culture of Modern Physics. (shrink)

The history of class, race and gender relations is largely under researched for the island territories of Curaçao, Bonaire, St Eustatius, Saba and St Maarten, the group of islands which comprise the Netherlands-Antilles. While there are archival sources which can depict some of this history, much of it remains submerged in our memories due to our self-imposed silences on these social issues. In this paper I extract some of this memory together with fragments of research already carried out, statistical evidence (...) available, and some of the struggles which the feminist movement has waged in regard to oppressive legislation which discriminated against women, to provide a glimpse of this postcolonial variation which also constitutes part of the Caribbean. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to offer a view of the current status of women in medical physics and biomedical engineering, while focusing on solutions towards gender balance and providing examples of current activities carried out at national and international levels. The International Union of Physical and Engineering Scientists in Medicine is committed to advancing women in science and health and has several initiatives overseen by the Women in Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering Task Group. Some of the main (...) strategies proposed by the Task Group to attain gender balance are: (a) identify and promote female role models that achieve successful work-life balance, (b) establish programs to develop female leaders, (c) create opportunities for females to increase the international visibility within the scientific community, and (d) establish archives and databases of women in STEM. (shrink)

Citizen Science in the Empire. The System Place “Wertlose Einsendungen aus der Bevölkerung” (Worthless Entries from the Population) in the Archives of the Berlin‐Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. Between 1871 and 1946, the Berlin‐Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities maintained a special collection in its archives, which, under the simple name “Entries from the Population”, kept correspondences, projects and proposals, for which a negative expert opinion was issued after thorough examination. The collection offers surprising insights into the (...) pathologies and fantasies of mostly pseudo‐scientific researchers, inventors and discoverers, while at the same time revealing a glimpse of the topics of this epoch that moved the history of science. Using a selection of examples, this essay examines the economic cycles and archive practices of a largely forgotten source of what is now called Citizen Science. (shrink)

The ArgumentUsing a pernicious Foucaultian reading of Weber's rationalization theories, I endeavor in this essay to illuminate academic acts as kept in the Brandenburg-Prussian state archive in Berlin, with some comparison to others, chiefly those in the Bavarian state archive in Munich. The essay concerns the microtechniques of marking, collecting and keeping records, and the form and content of archives of academic acts – interesting for the reason that paperwork circumscribes the state ministry's ability to recollect academic acts and (...) hence its power and knowledge over academics. I consider mostly acts relating to the early modern “Arts and Philosophy Faculty,” which corresponds more or less to the present-day “Division of Arts, Letters and Sciences.” The transformation, traced from the Baroque to the Romantic era, is understood as a process of “ministerial-market rationalization” of German academia: I try to show how central German ministries, as reflected in archival acts, altered the academic persona to suit themselves and the market, and how professorial appointments were rationalized accordingly. (shrink)

In light of the upcoming anniversary of the Berlin University, this study of the philosopher Paul Hofmann analyzes his precarious position as lecturer at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-University, which was abruptly terminated in 1938 because of his Jewish ancestry and his anti-Nazi position. After years of inner migration, Hofmann resumed teaching as Ordinarius and with new impulses in 1945. At the core of his philosophy was the philosophy of humanity that developed from different positions in his major work “Sinn und Geschichte.” (...) He provided his philosophy with new accents after 1945, while already suffering from severe illness. The study is based on extensive archival material. (shrink)

What were the earliest reactions to Gödel's incompleteness theorems? After a brief summary of previous work in this area I analyse, by means of unpublished archival material, the first reactions in Vienna and Berlin to Gödel's groundbreaking results. In particular, I look at how Carnap, Hempel, von Neumann, Kaufmann, and Chwistek, among others, dealt with the new results.

The paper presents important new information about the life of Jean Barbeyrac, the famous Huguenot translator of Grotius, Pufendorf, and Cumberland. Based on extensive research in the Secret State Archives (Geheimes Staatsarchiv) and the archive of the French Church (Französicher Dom) in Berlin, it discusses two previously unknown letters of Barbeyrac to court officials, and the role of this interaction in his departure, in 1710, to the University of Lausanne. It also reintroduces a relatively unknown work by Barbeyrac on (...) gambling, the Traité du Jeu (1709), and clarifies the role of various personages in the French Colony of Berlin in the early eighteenth century. The investigation articulates various family relationships of Barbeyrac and follows him to the University of Groningen (in 1717)—a relatively unexplored period of his life—whose archives have recently yielded a comprehensive inventory of his possessions. Also, by analyzing documents dealing with the life of Barbeyrac's brother, Jacques, the paper contributes to our understanding of the early modern pastorate in Brandenburg (Prussia). A prelude to a larger study of Barbeyrac and the Huguenot diaspora in Berlin, it focuses on essential texts, both old and new, which are needed for an adequate understanding of this formative period of the early German Enlightenment and its main figures. (shrink)

Das Schleiermacher-Archiv ist primär ein begleitendes Publikationsorgan für die seit 1980 erscheinende Gesamtausgabe der Werke Friedrich Schleiermachers (KGA), welches Materialien und Untersuchungen veröffentlicht, die in engerer Beziehung zur KGA stehen. In Sammelbänden werden zudem Beiträge dokumentiert, die auf internationalen Schleiermacher-Kongressen vorgetragen worden oder in diesem Zusammenhang entstanden sind.

This article compares the thinking of Andrzej Walicki and Isaiah Berlin on the nineteenth-century Russian intelligentsia and on Soviet totalitarianism. It suggests that Berlin saw totalitarianism as an externally imposed political system, whereas Walicki understood totalitarianism to depend both on external pressure and inner coercion. The article draws on a variety of published and unpublished sources, including personal interviews with Walicki and Berlin’s archives at the New Bodleian Library in Oxford, England.

Changing Modes: The Recent History of the Voice Recordings in the Berlin Sound Archive. The Sound Archive (Lautarchiv) of the Humboldt‐Universität zu Berlin is a collection of language and voice recordings dating back to recording activities in prisoner of war camps during World War I. Since 1990 the recordings have been included in and used for various scientific and cultural modes of research and presentation. This article illustrates the ways in which the collection in both its entirety as (...) well as in its individual objects have been transformed and relocated, thus changing their meanings within these different contexts. Particularly their inclusions into these very different structural and cultural modes have not only opened up new dimensions and opportunities, but at the same time also have shown specific limitations and determinations. The Sound Archive appears to thus be an example of an academic collection at the interfaces of both cultural and scientific activity in a constant process of transformation. (shrink)

During the 19th century, various frameworks were established in Germany for the purpose of providing Jewish students with religious education. The article deals primarily with the orthodox Congregation Adass-Isroel Religious School. Established in 1869 in Berlin, the school had a major impact on the development of supplementary religious instruction throughout Germany and served as a model in this area. The school's background, history, basic principles and method of instruction, as well as study subjects are discussed and compared to corresponding (...) religious schools. Research is based on the school's annual reports, archival material, scholarly literature, memoirs, and newspapers. (shrink)

Over two hundred years after Immanuel Kant’s death, the first full, critical, and digital edition of his last manuscript is currently being completed by the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften. This edition stands in institutional continuity with Wilhelm Dilthey’s monumental Akademieausgabe of Kant’s writings that was grounded in Dilthey’s lastingly influential concept of the national, literary-philosophical archive. The new edition showcases Kant’s dynamic writing process as a matter of investigation in its own right. As I argue here, it brings into (...) view the constitutive role of the archive for both texts and interpretative practices. A historical perspective that links the legacy of the Akademieausgabe with the digital edition of the Opus postumum highlights the changing role of the archive in emphasising or de-emphasising the manuscript’s resistance to certain appropriations and stylisations of Kant as a thinker. (shrink)

This essay examines Isaiah Berlin's ambivalent relationship with the ideas and practices of Jewish nationalism and the ways in which this ambivalence shaped some of the key premises of his political thought. Drawing upon extensive archival research in his unpublished letters from the mid-1930s to the late 1950s, this essay reconstructs Berlin's attempt to reconcile himself with the national idea. This attempt forced him to enrich his liberalism, and pushed him to develop and adopt the Jewish normalization discourse. (...) In the course of those intra-Jewish debates Berlin also began to conceptualize freedom as an opportunity concept, an idea that would later become central both in Berlin's famous negative concept of freedom and in his pluralism. Adopting a dual perspective, which considers Berlin as both a British liberal and a Russian-Jewish émigré intellectual, I therefore offer to see the Jewish Zionist writings as complementary rather than secondary to Berlin's enterprise. (shrink)

Hegel's reading of Hafez as part of his Berlin aesthetics lectures. The jargon of the prosaic world -/- This essay deals with Hegel's reading (Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, 1770 - 1831) of Hafez' poetry (Moḥammad Schams ad-Din Hafez Schirazi, around 1315 - 1390) during his lectures on the Aesthetics or Philosophy of Art at the University of Berlin (1820/21; 1823; 1826; 1828/29). Hegel's writings, Lectures on Aesthetics, were published from his remains by Heinrich Gustav Hotho (1802 - 1873) (...) in three volumes (1835 - 1838) and in a second edition from 1842 onwards. The posthumously published writings of Hegel are, considering the preserved archive material and the unreliable editing work by Hotho, a thoroughly complex research topic. Therefore, this problem area also forms the starting point of the present analysis of Hegel's reading of Hafez. -/- Within the framework of this essay, Hegel's categories of historical frameworks (Symbolic, Classical, and Romantic Art), especially that of the "Symbolic Art", are examined in his lectures on Aesthetics . This will do in three steps: starting with the current state of research, problematizing of Hegelian concepts in his Lectures on Aesthetics like "oriental Pantheism" or Vorkunst, ("the threshold of art" or "praeambula": T. M. Knox' translation, 1975, part I); extending the discussion by focusing on similarities and differences between Hegel's reading of Goethe (part II) and Hegel's reading of Hafez (part III) in his Berlin Aesthetics Lectures of the 1820's. For this purpose, material from Goethe's literary remains (II), as well as a masterpiece of Dutch painters van Eyck analyzed by Hegel (Ghent Altarpiece) during his lectures (III), will be included in the analysis and explored from an interdisciplinary and intercultural perspective. In doing so, Goethe's “Space of Experience and Horizon of Expectation” (Koselleck) in imitating Arabic script and calligraphy (II) is linked to Hegel's reading of Hafez during his Berlin lectures on aesthetics (III). Thus, a dialogue of cultures unfolds between poetry and philosophy. The main questions are: How does the German philosopher Hegel interpret and receive Hafiz's poetry in the context of German idealist philosophy as a topic of his lectures on aesthetics? What epistemological aspects can be gained from Hegel's reading of Hafez for a cultural studies analysis, especially regarding the history of the ideas? In addition to analyzing the historical aspects, the aim is also to uncover new perspectives in order to look with Hafez and Rumi at Hegel's problem child of ‘history’. Of particular interest are epistemological aspects and problems of reception and translation studies in sense of interdisciplinary and intercultural research (e. g. connected/entangled histories; boundary objects). Interculturality is understood in the context of the present essay as a cross-disciplinary theoretical framework in the sense of entangled histories research work interwoven with communication, aesthetic and cultural techniques approaches or resilience studies in a historical perspective. (shrink)

The article presents the history of foundation of the Russian Scientific Institute in Berlin based on German archival materials and periodicals of the 1920s–1930s. The role of the Germans in the institutionalization, as well as the importance of the Institute in the creative biography of S.L. Frank have been analyzed. Special attention is paid to the lecture courses of the Russian philosopher, which were given at the Russian Scientific Institute in Berlin. It is emphasized that with the work (...) of S.L. Frank an appeal was introduced to the study of the problems of Russian thought and spiritual culture, which in general was not common for the philosopher in the preemigrant period. Thus, the Institute provided to S.L. Frank the institutional legitimation of research, which partly corresponded to the aspirations and expectations of the German side that participated in the foundation of the Russian Scientific Institute in Berlin. In the appendix archival materials – transcripts of four lectures of the philosopher under the general theme “Modern trends in philosophy”, given under the auspices of the Institute in late 1928 – early 1929 and stored in the Bakhmetev Archives of Columbia University (New York, USA) are also published. (shrink)

From its beginnings, some of German film's most prominent genres and directors have focused on the natural world and its transformations by humans. Heimat films, "city symphonies," mountain films, and rubble films all blend the boundary between landscape documentary and fiction film. Yet German film studies has been slow to adopt an environmental focus, concentrating (understandably) on its subject matter's political implications. This book reveals critical connections between German film, sociopolitical context, and environment, showing it to have been a creative (...) catalyst for the social and ecological transformation of the Anthropocene. The book first considers the interplay between German film and environmental history in films and discourses of Heimat. Weimar-era films such as E. A. Dupont's Die Geierwally (1921), Carl Ludwig Achaz-Duisberg's Sprengbagger 1010 (1929), and Phil Jützi's Hunger in Waldenburg (1929) document and create a forum for discussing environmental change. The book then looks at film as a visual archive of and catalyst for infrastructure development, focusing on Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927), the mountain films of Arnold Fanck, and the Berlin films Stadt der Millionen (Adolf Trotz, 1925), Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Grossstadt (Walter Ruttmann, 1927), and Menschen am Sonntag (1930). Nazi-era and postwar films are also examined. By exploring German film history alongside environmental history and theory, this book provides a case study of the power of film within processes of environmental transformation. (shrink)

Alain Deligne est philosophe et Professeur émérite de littérature française à l'Université de Münster (Allemagne). Ses travaux portent sur l'idéalisme allemand (Schopenhauer, Schleiermacher), sur la traduction, la littérature ainsi que sur l'image. Il est coéditeur de catalogues sur la caricature ainsi que de la revue Ridiculosa et l'auteur de la première monographie française sur C. G. Carus (La Terre qui vit - Peinture et savoirs, 2003), et de la première monographie allemande sur Weil (Ein zeitgenôssischer Philosoph, 1998). Du jeune Éric (...) Weil, recommandé par Albert Einstein à Ernst Cassirer, on connaissait son doctorat sur Pomponazzi (1932), son essai sur Plotin et Ficin (1933) et son grand article sur l'intérêt pris à l'histoire (1935). Mais nous ignorions tout d'autres écrits précédents ou contemporains. Grâce au travail d'édition bilingue d'Alain Deligne, nous avons maintenant accès à ses exposés d'étudiant, conférences, articles, interventions radiophoniques ou ses travaux en vue de futures études (1922-1936). Nous pouvons ainsi mieux saisir ce qu'Éric Weil allait devenir : le fondateur d'un système ouvert de compréhension (Logique de la philosophie, 1950) et rester : un philosophe curieux de toutes les formes de savoir. À cette fin, il fallait, sur la base d'archives, restituer ses multiples intérêts en philosophie, sciences, histoire de l'art, germanistique, Renaissance italienne et occultisme. Sa pensée plonge ses racines dans les débats politiques de la République de Weimar pré-hitlérienne. Depuis l'exil parisien de 1933, Éric Weil en affrontera toute la violence."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

This article discusses the conditions of research in international and European contexts, in particular European elite politics and politicians, arguing that the researcher is a central agent and research instrument in this process. The article suggests that the researcher finds herself renegotiating parts of her socially assigned identity in relation to European national and international structures and discusses the ways in which the gendered ‘self’ remains the centre of a research project above other identity componentseven in such conditions that might (...) appear to be gender neutral. The article examines the micro-politics of research from the level of archive research to elite interviewing. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie Jahrgang: 101 Heft: 3 Seiten: 471-476.

Les archives municipales de Berlin ont conservé tous les documents produits par la Maison berlinoise du travail culturel, Berliner Haus für Kulturarbeit, qui a été fondée en 1953 sous le nom de Berliner Volkskunstkabinett et dissoute en 1991. Ces archives permettent de suivre en filigrane les réflexions conduites en RDA sur le thème de l’action culturelle publique, dont les deux interrogations principales peuvent se résumer ainsi : comment peut-on encourager différentes formes de participation des travailleurs et ainsi favoriser le (...) développement d’un art censé être authentiquement populaire et acquis à la cause de la révolution socialiste? Et comment l’art peut-il être le vecteur d’une identification « nationale » avec l’État de RDA? Nous proposons d’étudier ces archives sous l’angle du combat mené par le SED, le parti communiste au pouvoir en RDA, pour créer une société révolutionnaire, pour rendre possible l’utopie d’une société parfaitement égalitaire par le moyen de l’art. En effet, si les choix économiques, politiques, sociaux du SED sont bien connus aujourd’hui, les chercheurs se sont pour l’instant moins intéressés au langage du politique dans le domaine artistique, et notamment à la question centrale de savoir comment ce régime concevait son rôle et sa responsabilité à l’égard des pratiques artistiques des ouvriers. (shrink)