Institutions and Reforms
Institutions and Reforms
This chapter assesses the eighteenth-century university in terms of its widespread decline and instances of innovation and renewal. Criticism, pedagogical reform, and curricular change are examined in German faculties of theology, especially at the Enlightenment reform institutions: Prussia’s University of Halle (founded in 1694) and Hanover’s University of Göttingen (1737). The idea of a scientific encyclopedia, a combination of the Aristotelian tradition of philosophy as paradigmatic knowledge with new designs for ordering that knowledge, became a fundamental feature of the increasingly modern university. Through the contributions of state ministers and theologians, the University of Göttingen pioneered in each faculty instruction in the ‘encyclopedia and methodology’ of the academic disciplines. These groundbreaking courses treated the unity and coherence of each subject in isolation and in connection to other fields, reflecting the university’s very nature. Johann Salomo Semler (1725–91), Johann Lorenz von Mosheim (1693–1755), and others are discussed.
Keywords: University of Halle, University of Göttingen, pedagogical reform, Enlightenment, J. S. Semler, J. L. Mosheim, state ministers
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