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Interdisciplinarity in the 17th century? A co-occurrence analysis of early modern German dissertation titles

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Abstract

In this paper we examine titles of early modern German dissertations with regard to their ‘interdiscplinarity’, challenging the established consensus that interdisciplinarity evolved only in the 18th century. Based on the construction and analysis of a co-occurrence network of 909 dissertation titles published in the 17thc entury it can be shown that various dimensions of early modern interdisciplinarity should be distinguished. This concerns dissertations that connect philosophical disciplines to the ‘higher’ faculties of the early modern university (theology, jurisprudence, medicine) as well as titles that connect theoretical and practical subdisciplines of philosophy itself. We also observe that the emerging disciplines of historiography and philology seem to play a prominent role in the emergence of early modern interdisciplinarity. On a structural level it seems to be misguided to construe the early modern system of knowledge as a ‘tree’. It rather seems that relations betweeen disciplines in this period exhibit both tree-like and lattice-like features.

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Notes

  1. For an interesting example in digital science studies see the large-scale analysis of over 10 million scientific visualisations in Tan et al., 2021.

  2. Metadata are, of course, relevant for investigations in history of the book (Lahti et al., 2019), but can also be used for the reconstruction of intellectual networks (Hill et al., 2019; Sangiacomo & Beers, 2020) or the analysis of literary genres (Gittel, 2021) to mention just a few examples.

  3. For data and code see Heßbrüggen-Walter 2023.

  4. This is at least how Schaffer, 2010, p. 2 summarises the relevant discussions.

  5. On Fabricius cf. Heßbrüggen-Walter 2020.

  6. According to Stichweh, 2009, p. 2 we can regard disciplines in this sense as ‘archival’ or ‘classificatory’ categories. For a more comprehensive assessment of textbooks as genre see Schmitt, 1988.

  7. The reader may feel reminded of the use of this metaphor in the Preface to the French translation of Descartes’s Principia Philosophia (Descartes, 1946, p. 14).

  8. See above, footnote 6.

  9. This was known from the beginning of the project, see Pfeiffer et al., 1993.

  10. This aspect is absent in Scholz, 2021.

  11. Although we have identified 162 unique interdisciplinary combinations of disciplinary labels, this does not translate into an equal number of edges, because edges are not directed.

  12. If we understand dissertations as a visible result of university teaching, this finding is remarkable insofar as it shows that the subdisciplines assembled here may have been more permeable in practice than the ‘tree-of-knowledge’ metaphor for the organisation of learned disciplines would suggest. The combination of mathematical practices with history, philology, and politics is certainly surprising (more so than the combination with philosophy in general or physics).

  13. See page 6.

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  1. Centre des Études Superieurs de la Renaissance, Loire Valley Institute for Advanced Studies, Université François Rabelais, Orléans, Tours, France

    Stefan Heßbrüggen-Walter

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Heßbrüggen-Walter, S. Interdisciplinarity in the 17th century? A co-occurrence analysis of early modern German dissertation titles. Synthese 203, 67 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-024-04494-2

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