Article ID: CBB001551432

A Diversity of Divisions: Tracing the History of the Demarcation between the Sciences and the Humanities (2015)

unapi

Bouterse, Jeroen (Author)
Karstens, Bart (Author)


Isis: International Review Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences
Volume: 106, no. 2
Issue: 2
Pages: 341-352


Publication Date: 2015
Edition Details: Part of a Series: The History of Humanities and the History of Science
Language: English

Throughout history, divides between the sciences and the humanities have been drawn in many different ways. This essay shows that the notion of a divide became more urgent and pronounced in the second half of the nineteenth century. While this shift has several causes, the essay focuses on the rise of the social sciences, which is interpreted as posing a profound challenge to the established disciplines of the study of humankind. This is demonstrated by zooming in on linguistics, one of the key traditional disciplines of the humanities. Through the assumption of a correspondence between mental and linguistic categories, psychology became of central importance in the various conceptions of linguistics that emerged in the nineteenth century. Both linguistics and psychology were very much engaged in a process of discipline formation, and opinions about the proper directions of the fields varied considerably. Debates on these issues catalyzed the construction of more radical divisions between the sciences and the humanities. Both Wilhelm Dilthey's dichotomy between understanding and explanation and Wilhelm Windelband's dichotomy between nomothetic and idiographic sciences respond to these debates. While their constructions are often lumped together, the essay shows that they actually meant very different things and have to be treated accordingly.

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Article Bod, Rens; Kursell, Julia (2015) Introduction: The Humanities and the Sciences. Isis: International Review Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences (pp. 337-340). unapi

Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB001551432/

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Authors & Contributors
Kaplan, Judith R. H.
McMullan, Luke Anthony
Fréchette, Guillaume
Spadafora, Andrew Jeffrey
Gordon, Peter
Damböck, Christian
Concepts
Psychology
Linguistics; philology
Controversies and disputes
Philosophy
Historical method
Language and languages
Time Periods
19th century
20th century, early
18th century
20th century
Places
Germany
United States
Netherlands
Switzerland
France
Denmark
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