Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte. Band 63,2

The term »Aufklärung« [enlightenment] fulfills a crucial function in Hermann Lübbe’s political philosophy which advocates the implementation and conservation of Western democratic thought as an effective means to establish the political norms of the secular age. From early on, Lübbe has argued for the liberalizing effects of secularization as a win-win-situation that emancipates politics from religious doctrines and at the same time sets religion free from the state. Intensified by the ramifications of 1968, Lübbe’s position regarding the legacy of the enlightenment became controversial. In opposition, especially to Jürgen Habermas’s »Projekt der Moderne« [project of modernity], Lübbe has developed a concept of philosophy »nach der Aufklärung« [after enlightenment} which aims at securing the contents of secular liberalism and fending off new ideological attacks against the liberal state and industrial society. At the same time, Lübbe insists that religion remains important for modernity as an irreplaceable means of coping with and making sense of contingency.

Hermann Lübbe’s distinctive contribution to conceptual history needs to be seen in the discipline’s wider political context in post-war Germany. This contribution outlines the cultural conditions, intellectual backgrounds and institutional prerequisites of Lübbe’s pertinent work. An additional focus is twofold: On the one hand, the article describes Lübbe’s inimitable rhetoric of presence as a means of keeping philosophy in touch with contemporary real-world problems; on the other, it explores the question of how this philosopher’s style and conceptual productivity translate into the peculiarities of a late work that awaits posterity’s interest and judgement in ever more changing and uncontrollable times.

Hermann Lübbe distinguishes between philosophy in a professional, academically disciplined sense, on the one hand, and philosophy in an »exoteric«, public sense on the other. In both its forms of existence, philosophy is concerned with orientation. Lübbe characterizes nonacademic philosophy as »the epitome of systems of orientation as a last resort in the contexts of any practice«. Professional philosophy has the task of reflecting »on the prerequisites of our orientation practice« and, if necessary, acting as an »orientation crisis manager«. This conceivably broad opening of the concept of philosophy brings with it the problem of its demarcation from what Lübbe calls »worldview« and »ideology of life«.

The multivolume Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie counts as a pioneering reference work in the historiography of concepts both in philosophy and neighboring disciplines. Its beginnings lie in the late 1950s and early 1960s when ambitious assistants of the Münster philosopher Joachim Ritter launched it as a collaborative and comparatively non-hierarchical endeavor of themselves and their academic teacher. This contribution documents a 1958 memorandum (»Gutachten«) that advertises the project to a German publisher as well as minutes of an editorial meeting held in July 1959 between Joachim Ritter and his assistants. In the light of these previously unpublished documents the eminent role of Hermann Lübbe, Karlfried Gründer and Robert Spaemann in planning and starting the project is thrown into relief.

The article examines the history of the term »Artigkeit« [courtesy, civility, politeness, courteousness] in the period from about 1700 to 1900. The term, which was used as a synonym for politeness or gallantry, is initially situated in the context of rhetoric and early modern behavioral doctrines. In the course of the 18th century, the term is reinterpreted and naturalized. »Artigkeit« is no longer characterized by complaisance, but by openness, frankness, and natural expression. In the long term, the concept migrates to pedagogy, where the problems that had already determined the discussion of »Artigkeit« are brought back under different auspices.

The aim of this paper is to sketch an approach for integrating the historiography of the sciences and of philosophy. More precisely, the paper suggests a method for investigating interactions within transdisciplinary constellations of researchers working in philosophy and in the exact sciences. I start off by introducing specific notions of analogy, variation, and conceptual space which provide the main ingredients of this method. The notion of a conceptual space, as well as other characteristics of the present approach, are adaptations from so-called constellation research. Originally, constellation research was developed for the historiography of philosophy – especially in the context of the origins of German idealism. However, as I will argue in the second half of the paper, it is adaptable to the historiography of science, especially of the exact sciences. To support this claim and to illustrate the integrative power of the present approach, I will (i) compare the notions of a constellation and a conceptual space with Ludwik Fleck’s notions of a »thought collective« and a »style of thought«, (ii) critically evaluate the distinction between contexts of discovery and of justification in a historiographical context, and (iii) relate the notions of analogy and variation, as introduced in the first part of the paper, to current debates about what is sometimes called »invariantism« in the philosophy of science.

This second part of Begriffsforschung im Interdisziplinären Kontext places the project of criteriological conceptual research in relation to various disciplinary discourses, each of which has developed its own forms and conceptions of conceptual research. The aim of discussing them comparatively is to make visible points of connections and to name transitions. By collating central theorems and text passages from the discourses of philosophical conceptual analysis, cognitive linguistics, and Begriffsgeschichte, the contours of experimental conceptual research emerge. It views concepts neither merely as empirical phenomena nor from an ontological, logical, or conceptual-engineering point of view, but from the perspective of empirically open, world-opening practices, in short: from the point of view of research.

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