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The Revolution in the World-View of History
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 July 2024
Extract
About twenty years ago a book entitled Umsturz im Weltbild der Physik (“The Revolution in the World-View of Physics”) appeared and was eventually widely read. It described the basic change which our views in the natural sciences had undergone during the first three decades of this century.
A similar book could be written today concerning the other, humanistic side of our conception of the world, for so radical a change has taken place since then in humanistic ideas as well, that it approaches complete revolution. This change can be briefly described as a transition from the part-whole synthetic point of view to whole-part, analytic thinking; from a Ptolemaic, egocentric standpoint to a Copernican, relativistic one; and from “thinking in terms of nations” to “thinking in cultures.”
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- Copyright © 1955 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)
References
1. By H. Zimmern.
2. People had, of course, talked of "cultures" in the sense of "civilizations" long before Spengler, but only with reference to non-western cultural communities and without the precise definition that Spengler gave the concept.
3. Cf., for example, the exceptionally cautious treatment ofthe question by A. J. Toynbee, A Study of History (London, Oxford University Press, 1933).
4. Oswald Spengler, The Decline ofthe West (New York, Knopf, 1932, p. 25). Pitirim A. Sorokin, Social Philosophies of an Age of Crisis (Boston, Beacon Press, 1951), p. 265, and cf. pp. 279 ff., 287 f.; a similar statement appears in A. J. Toynbee, op. cit., Vol. I.
5. The separation of the "nomothetic" and the "idiographic" sciences made by Windel band and Rickert is based on this limitation.
6. The biologist J. von Uexküll has calculated that he would have to live three average life-spans in order to master the special literature of the last sixty years in his field. The literature of such a narrowly limited field as psychological Gestalt theory, of which we shall speak below, comprehended, according to the statement of R. Matthaeis in Das Gestaltproblem (Munich, 1929), even a quarter-century ago over six hundred items, and this is a case of a special disci pline, with only a few works reaching back past 1900, that is, at the time the book was pub lished.
7. S. Karl Buhler, Die Krise der Psychologie (Jena, 1927).
8. The chief representatives of psychological Gestalt theory are Christian von Ehrenfels (1859-1932), Alexius Meinong (1853-1920), Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang Köhler, Georg Elias Müller, Kurt Koffka, Bruno Petermann, Felix Krueger, and Ferdinand Weinhandl. The latest survey of the field can be found in David Katz, Gestaltpsychologie (Basel, 1944); see also Matthaei, op. cit.