Abstract
This article examines the internationalization of scientific and scholarly communication in the period before World War I, taking philosophy as an example. In the first part of the article, several general trends in internationalization during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are examined. This includes the importance of international experience for Russia’s policies today towards science and education. The main part of this article is devoted to the concept of the “international argument” and provides an analysis of three types of appeal to the international community: the pragmatic, the reputational, and the communicative. The increasing importance of international communication during this period is shown on the basis of examples drawn from German philosophical discussions that took place between the first third and the end of the nineteenth century (the case of Friedrich Eduard Beneke and Hermann Ebbinghaus). The last part of the article examines the impact on German science and philosophy of the cessation of international communication during World War I.
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Notes
For a broad historical and regional perspective on this process of alternating intensification and crisis of international relations among the sciences cf. Kolčinskij (2003).
It was at just this time that Marx and Engels in the “Manifesto of the Communist Party” announced a general trend towards the globalization of contemporary capitalism: “In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature” (Marx and Engels 1976, 488).
According to Andreev, the number of Russian students in Germany from 1698 to 1849 was 926. From 1698 to 1810, there were 637, and from 1811 to 1849, 289 (Andreev, 2005).
According to the Russian Presidential Decree of 7 May 2012, No. 599, “Measures for the Implementation of State Policy in Education and the Sciences,” these measures are to ensure, in particular, “the entry by 2020 of no less than five Russian universities into the top 100 leading universities, according to the world ranking of universities.”
Russia joined the Bologna Process in September 2003 at the Berlin meeting of European ministers of education.
See, in particular, the three volumes devoted to the analysis of the three “great disputes” in nineteenth century German philosophy (Bayertz et al. 2007) and the analysis of the “psychologism dispute” (Kusch 1995; Rath 1994; Kurennoy 2010b). For a general classification and analysis of a number of fundamental discussions in German academic philosophy see Kurennoy 2010a.
As can be expected, an orientation towards the various measures of communicational activity, viewed pragmatically as the absolute benchmarks of scientific activity, acquires a particularly acute, one might say, fetishized, character in countries that are trying to catch up or that are undergoing imitative modernization. Aleksandr K’osev, analyzing the specifics of university policy in such countries remarks: “The university in its present form—in Germany, France and the USA—is based on the idea of truth, the unity of knowledge and freedom, i.e., on the fundamental principle of reason. However, in the Romantic and Enlightenment interpretation, “reason” means, among other things, that very “universality” which lies in the very word “university,” the universe of knowledge and culture. As it turns out, however, in the strange processes of modernization, it, the “universal university,” constantly produces its non-universal counterparts—local, provincial educational institutions, which arise in its image and likeness and which transform the central questioning into generally well-known theses, into “prestigious” quotations for the provinces” (K’osev 2002, 96).
Cf. “Now as before, we, wishing to be philosophers, must be, above all, Westernizers. We must recognize that however significant and interesting individual Russian phenomena may be within the scope of scientific philosophy, philosophy, being initially Greek, is presently primarily German. This is shown not so much by contemporary German philosophy itself, but by the indubitable fact that all contemporary original and significant philosophical thought in all countries bears the obvious stamp of German Idealism. On the other hand, all attempts at philosophical creativity that ignore this legacy are unlikely to be recognized as truly significant and genuinely productive.” “From the Editorial Staff,” Logos: Meždunarodnyj ežegodnik po filosofii kul’tury, 1910, #1. Reprinted edition, M: Territorija buduščego, 2005, 13.
K.-O. Apel has explicitly formulated a communicational-interpretive conception of scientific knowledge (see Apel’ 2001). This conception allows us to impart a meaningful and normative character to a communicational international argument, although in terms of its meaning this normativity cannot be reduced to a factual state including international scientific communication. (We cannot exclude the possibility that the factual state of international communications at a particular moment can conflict with the situation of an “ideal communicational community of scientists and scholars”). However, although such a possibility cannot be ruled out, it can be considered extremely unlikely under the current historical conditions.
Here, however, it is only a matter of an anticipation of psychologism, rather than of its direct influence, which he never had on the chief representatives of psychologism in the second half of the nineteenth century.
For a presentation of the various accusations against Beneke and an analysis of the role of his works in nineteenth century German academic philosophy, see Köhnke (1986, 69–88).
Dilthey wrote to Count Paul Yorck von Wartenburg (3 March 1896) that he did not want “under any circumstances to be in the same room with him” (Dilthey and von Wartenburg 1923, 210).
Kusch (1995, 213). Cf. Ringer (2008, 218–239).
For a detailed overview of the history of Logos, see Kramme (1995). See also our comparative investigation of the influence of the different institutional environments in Russia and Germany on the way the content of the journal’s philosophical program was modified in these different contexts (Kurennoy 2012).
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This article was prepared in connection with a fundamental research program at the National Research University—Higher School of Economics—2013 Project of the Research Laboratory on Culture of the Center for Fundamental Research of the National Research University—Higher School of Economics: “State Policy and Ideology in the Field of Culture.”.
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Kurennoy, V. International argument: regarding the history of the development of international philosophical communication in the nineteenth century. Stud East Eur Thought 66, 17–28 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-014-9200-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-014-9200-7