Epistemic Virtues in the Sciences and the Humanities

Jeroen van Dongen is Professor of the History of Science at the University of Amsterdam. He is the author of Einstein’s Unification (Cambridge University Press, 2010). He has served as Editor and Associate Editor of the Collected Papers of Albert Einstein at Caltech and recently edited the volume Cold War Science and the Transatlantic Circulation of Knowledge (Brill, 2015). Van Dongen has published extensively in journals as Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics, Centaurus and Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences. Herman Paul is Associate Professor of Historical Theory and Historiography at Leiden University. He is the author of Key Issues in Historical Theory (Routledge, 2015) and Hayden White: The Historical Imagination (Polity Press, 2011) and project leader of ‘The Scholarly Self: Character, Habit, and Virtue in the Humanities, 1860-1930.’ Out of this project emerged several articles thatare of immediate relevance to the proposed volume, including ‘Virtue Language in Nineteenth-Century Orientalism: A Case Study in Historical Epistemology,’  Modern Intellectual History (forthcoming); ‘What Is a Scholarly Persona? Ten Theses on Virtues, Skills, and Desires,’ History and Theory 53 (2014), 348-371; ‘Weak Historicism: On Hierarchies of Intellectual Virtues and Goods,’ Journal of the Philosophy of History 6 (2012), 369-388; and ‘Performing History: How Historical Scholarship is Shaped by Epistemic Virtues,’ History and Theory 50 (2011), 1-19.

• Introduction (Jeroen van Dongen).- 1. Confidence, Humility, and Virtue in Nineteenth Century Philosophies (Ian James Kidd).- 2. The Rise of Objectivity: Epistemic Virtues and Social Change in the Nineteenth-Century Netherlands (Ad Maas).- 3. The Scientific Imagination in Britain around 1900 (Léjon Saarloos).- 4. The Documentalist and the Adventurer: Epistemic Virtues in Interwar Nature Protection (Raf de Bont).- 5. Religious and Scientific Virtues: Maxwell, Eddington, and Overcoming Obstacles (Matt Stanley).- 6. ‘Broken Symmetry’: Physics, Aesthetics, and Moral Virtue in Nuclear Age America (Jessica Wang).- 7. Left Radicalism and the Milky Way: Connecting the Socialist and Scientific Virtues of Anton Pannekoek (Chaokang Tai).- 8. The Portraits of Hermann von Holst: Character and Virtue in the Historical Discipline around 1900 (Kasper Risbjerg Eskildsen).- 9. Weber, Wöhler, and Waitz: Virtue Language in Late Nineteenth-Century Physics, Chemistry, and History (Herman Paul).- 10. A Virtuous Theorist’s Theoretical Virtues: Einstein on Physics versus Mathematics and Experience versus Unification (Jeroen van Dongen).- 11. How Interactions between Humanities and Science Shed New Light on Shared Epistemic Virtues (Rens Bod).