Kristine Palmieri

At the IZEA I conduct new research for my first monograph: "The Philology Seminar: Critical Thinking and the Rise of German Science." This book illuminates the foundational and formative role that classical philology played in the development of science in Germany. It does so by explaining how philology seminars came to cultivate a distinctive philological ethos and by tracing why it was transformed into a broadly scientific ethos as it permeated higher education in the German states during the period 1700–1870. It also foregrounds the ways in which classical philology’s increasing scientific legitimacy and institutional authority, as well as its growing educational and cultural significance both contributed to and were the result of larger political, socio-cultural, and intellectual developments.

In The Philology Seminar I argue that the scientific ethos that emerged out of the philology seminars undergirded the meteoric rise of German science because it prefigured what American pragmatist John Dewey would come to call ‘critical thinking’ in the early twentieth century. And in making this argument I aim not only to shed new light on the relationship between  science and the humanities, I also aim to highlight the epistemological limits of contemporary definitions of ‘science,’ and to raise new questions about the structure and dynamics of modernity. This book thus brings together the history of science and knowledge with German cultural, political, and intellectual history as well as the interdisciplinary field of Enlightenment studies.

During my time at the IZEA, I work to develop a more robust account of classical philology at the Universities of Halle and Wittenberg during the Enlightenment through new archival research.
I thus focus on three main topics: (1) Classical Philology at the University of Halle, 1694-1787; (2) Friedrich August Wolf and the Halle Philology Seminar, 1786-1806; (3) Classical Languages and the Philology Seminar at the University of Wittenberg.