The Halle Orphanage as scientific community
Subtitle: observation, eclecticism, and pietism in the early Enlightenment
By: Kelly Joan Whitmer
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
Published: 2015
Place of publication: Chicago; London
Language: eng
Number of pages: 202
ISBN-13: 9780226243771; 9780226243801
Subjects: History; Science; Study and teaching; Education; Observation (Scientific method); Eclecticism; Pietism; Waisenhaus (Halle an der Saale, Germany)
Description: Founded around 1700 by a group of German Lutherans known as Pietists, the Halle Orphanage became the institutional headquarters of a universal seminar that still stands largely intact today. It was the base of an educational, charitable, and scientific community and consisted of an elite school for the sons of noblemen. Yet, its reputation as a Pietist enclave inhabited largely by young people has prevented the organisation from being taken seriously as a kind of scientific academy - even though, Kelly Joan Whitmer shows, this is precisely what it was. This book calls into question a long-standing tendency to view German Pietists as anti-science and anti-Enlightenment, arguing that these tendencies have drawn attention away from what was actually going on inside the orphanage.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Introducing the orphanage; title: Building a scientific community; title: Negotiating the Irenical turn; title: Models and conciliatory seeing; title: An observator and his instrument; title: Extending the orphanage.