Project manager: Prof. Dr. Daniel Fulda
To historicize, that is, to see all existence as "having-become" is seen, since Troeltsch, Koselleck, and Foucault as a fundamental thought pattern of cultural modernity, which took its essential shape in the eighteenth century. The practice of historicizing establishes continuities and in this ways reacts to a specifically modern experience of contingency.
1. Historicizing is considered as a process through which "historical thinking" conquered more and more areas of culture and society over the course of the European/Western modern period. Yet, the concomitant assumption must be challenged, that is, the idea that historicization is normally accompanied by an increasing loss of validity of universal reason, of an immutable nature, of religious postulates of transcendence, of the tradition, or of other standards which have at that point not yet been historicized, or are assumed to be in principle not historicize-able. The field of research must be extended to the central question of the paradoxical interaction between historicizing and its "adversaries" - whether they continue to be or have in fact already been integrated.
2. The scholarship's focus on the perception of history of the philosophers and poets and on the major authors of the history of historiography is equally unsatisfactory. The interdisciplinary research planned in the field "historicization" aims to address even-handedly the different practices of historicization in order to define more precisely their enormous scope.
3. The previous scholarship is limited due to a broad segmentation of its research according to language. We intend to connect the research on German-speaking Middle Europe with the research on France and Great Britain, and, if possible, to include areas which have been less studied, such as Italy and Russia. The particular focus is on the "long eighteenth century", which is considered as the defining phase of historicization, although the previous and following centuries of the modern period will occasionally be included, so the qualitative as well as quantitative scope of the impetus for historicization in the "saddle period" can be properly assessed.
The IZEA is housed within the Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg. As an institution of advanced study on the cultural and intellectual history of the 18th century, the IZEA contends with a period that laid the foundations of modern western society.
Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg
Interdisziplinäres Zentrum für die
Erforschung der Europäischen Aufklärung (IZEA)
Franckeplatz 1 // Haus 54
06110 Halle
Deutschland
izea(at)izea.uni-halle.de
Tel.: +49 345 55 21781
Fax: +49 345 55 27252