Historians' Virtues

Abstract

Why do historians so often talk about objectivity, empathy, and fair-mindedness? What roles do such personal qualities play in historical studies? And why does it make sense to call them virtues rather than skills or habits? Historians' Virtues is the first publication to explore these questions in some depth. With case studies from across the centuries, the Element identifies major discontinuities in how and why historians talked about the marks of a good scholar. At the same time, it draws attention to long-term legacies that last until today. Virtues were, and are, invoked in debates over the historian's task. They reveal how historians position themselves vis-à-vis political regimes, religious traditions, or neoliberal university systems. More importantly, they show that historical study not only requires knowledge and technical skills, but also makes demands on the character of its practitioners. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

The Icarus flight of speculation: Philosophers' vices as perceived by nineteenth‐century historians and physicists

“…Insofar as this means that the field seeks to "contribute to the ameliorative task of improving both our epistemic charac ters and the epistemic dynamics of our communities" (Kidd 2016, 181), language of virtue and vice as used by nineteenth-century historians and physicists suddenly becomes relevant, not for any conceptual clarity that it offers about the nature of speculation, but because it demonstrates that scholars cared about virtues and vices, that they made great efforts to specify which virtues were most important in their research areas, and that they tried to socialize their students into these virtues, both by talking about duties and dangers and by presenting (positive or negative) models of virtue and vice. No matter how polemical and self-justificatory this discourse could be, it demonstrates that there has been a tradition-indeed, a centuries-long tradition-of interpreting scholarly work and the demands it made on researchers in terms of virtuous character traits (Paul 2022). This suggests that, in the realm of scholarship at least, vice epistemologists do not need to apply abstract notions of virtue and vice to a field unfamiliar with this terminology.…”