Virtues and Vices in the Nineteenth-Century Humanities

Herman Paul is Professor of the History of the Humanities at Leiden University. He is the author, most recently, of Historians’ Virtues: From Antiquity to the Twenty-First Century (2022) and Dogmatism: On the History of a Scholarly Vice (with Alexander Stoeger, 2024). In 2024, he was elected a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW).

• Introduction: A Rhetorical Approach to Scholarly Virtues and Vices, Part I: Across Disciplines, 1. The Scholarly Self: Ideals of Intellectual Virtue in Nineteenth-Century Leiden, 2. Weber, Wöhler, and Waitz: Virtue Language in Late Nineteenth-Century Physics, Chemistry, and History, 3. An Ethos of Criticism: Virtues and Vices in Nineteenth-Century Strasbourg, Part II: Rhetorical Uses, 4. Hypercriticism: A Case Study in the Rhetoric of Vice, 5. Denial of Coevalness: Charges of Dogmatism in the Nineteenth-Century Humanities (with Caroline Schep), 6. Virtue Language in Nineteenth-Century Orientalism: A Case Study in Historical Epistemology, Part III: Cultural Repertoires, 7. German Thoroughness in Baltimore: Epistemic Virtues and National Stereotypes, 8. The Icarus Flight of Speculation: Philosophers' Vices as Perceived by Nineteenth-Century Historians and Physicists (with Sjang ten Hagen), 9. Labor ipse voluptas: Virtues of Work in Nineteenth-Century Germany, Acknowledgments, Index