The Viennese Philosophical Faculty around 1900

The differentiation of the natural sciences and the humanities around 1900 has been the topic of many studies. Some of these studies focus on internal differentiation and mostly deal with only one discipline`s history, looking at developments in adjacent fields in only a cursory manner. Research on the social history of scientific differentiation often pays little attention to the content of scientific and humanistic work. This project focuses on the negotiation processes in the Philosophical Faculty of the University of Vienna that shaped the differentiation of sciences and humanities in this period, combining both approaches and including interdisciplinary aspects. Philosophical faculties as scientific institutions have hardly been studied by historians, even though they are acknowledged to have been central to the emergence of the modern research university in German-speaking Europe. In the Vienna Philosophical Faculty, professors representing various scientific and humanistic disciplines negotiated appointments to chairs and the academic establishment of new disciplines. Their cooperative or competitive interactions were influenced by their own, usually multidisciplinary academic training, as well as their specific approaches to scientific and humanistic research and their different political viewpoints, religious denominations and social backgrounds. Not all members of the Faculty came from the educated bourgeois elite to which most university professors belonged. Furthermore, the professors came from various countries of the Habsburg Monarchy and from Germany. Their varied backgrounds and relatively broad academic training influenced negotiations over the admittance or exclusion of scientific theories, approaches, methods and schools, and this in turn produced and shaped a local scientific style characteristic of the Vienna Philosophical Faculty as a field of knowledge ("Raum des Wissens"). Attention will also be paid to the fact that the Philosophical Faculty was embedded in the specific political, cultural and social situation of the Habsburg Monarchy around 1900. First, the Faculty`s resolutions had to be approved by the Ministry of Education and executed by the Emperor. Here, different scientific interests and notions of the universities` function within the state and their impact on the Philosophical Faculty have to be considered. Second, the Philosophical Faculty was part of the history of the cultural phenomenon known as "Vienna 1900"; questions about the roles of liberalism, scientific rationalism, modernism and irrationalism within the Viennese bourgeoisie are therefore relevant to this study. Until now, studies of Vienna modernism have been focused mainly on art, literature and philosophy, and have included only a few prominent natural scientists. An analysis of the relationship between the scientific work done at the Philosophical Faculty and the already familiar cultural and scientific aspects of "Vienna 1900" will illuminate both more distinctly.

The projects main goal was to analyze how the facultys negotiations of the appointment of professors and of the establishment of chairs shaped the development of scientific and scholarly disciplines together with the Ministry of Educations final decisions. Around 1900, however, the Viennese Philosophical Faculty was most heavily affected by the limited financial resources it received from the government. These circumstances narrowed the circle of potential candidates for professorships to Austrian academics and hampered the establishment of new fields or new disciplines especially in the sciences, since most of them depended on expensive research equipment.The professors hardly had the opportunity to plan the development of the faculty as a scientific institution. The development or establishment of separate disciplines essentially depended on the availability of approachable candidates for professorships and their special field. Sometimes, when the continuation of a chair was in question, professors even chose argumentation strategies for the appointment of a new professor that were not consistent with the actual research work done in the discipline. In spite of the limited circumstances, there was little conflict in the faculty. The professors supported one anothers plans in order to achieve their colleagues support in return and to be able to present the ministry with proposals supported by large majorities. This kind of cooperation allowed each professor considerable influence on his own discipline. Strong competition can be observed only between closely related, well established disciplines, for example between mineralogy and geology. General agreement on methodological standards for scientific and scholarly research helped to prevent conflict between the scientific and the humanistic disciplines under their common roof.The Ministry of Education did little to shape the Philosophical Facultys profile. However, it had no special funds for the furthering of scientific or scholarly innovation at its disposal. It followed the facultys proposals as long as they did not demand high additional expenses. The ministrys tendency to choose the most economical solution impaired the career chances of young academics and hampered the development of new scientific or scholarly fields and disciplines. Financial sacrifices were only made in order to prevent the appointment of celebrities to chairs in foreign countries. With regard to the funding of individual disciplines the training of school teachers was the most important factor. Besides, the ministry tended to favor disciplines that were suited for the education of loyal citizens. In history and philosophy, the ministry tried to exert influence on research and teaching, which led to conflicts with the faculty.