Albrecht von Haller’s Self-Reviews and Style of Reasoning
From Firenze University Press Book: Philosophical Reviews in German Territories (1668–1799)
Claire Gantet, University of Fribourg, Switzerland
During his lifetime, Albrecht von Haller (1708–1777) impressed his contemporaries with his immense erudition and the sophistication of his information management. He was said to have read every scientific and certainly every medical work, and to have developed an ingenious system of notebooks with internal cross-references to serve in particular as working tools for his “li braries” or Bibliothecae, his monumental works reviewing the state of knowledge in a particular branch of learning. But alongside, and perhaps even more than, these voluminous works, scholarship was played out in public debate, especially in reviews of works in scholarly journals. T he review was invented and defined as a new literary genre in the founding issue of the Journal des Sçavans in 1666. The aim of the journal was to provide scholars with regular information on new publications and the academic world. The very term “journal” used by its first editor, Denis de Sallo, referred to a register in which merchants and tradesmen recorded their daily accounts and transactions, archiving and indexing them so that it could be consulted at a later date: from the outset, therefore, journals were not simply channels for information, but had to store and index the knowledge disseminated in the Republic of Letters. T he Journal des Sçavans had no systematic structure. For contemporaries, the internal openness of the journals contributed to the usefulness of knowledge. Some scholars, such as Leibniz, took a very self-confident stance,2 even though the status of the ‘reduced’ knowledge provided by scholarly journals quickly became controversial — it was lamented very early on that people no longer read books, but only more or less biased reviews. From the outset, Denis de Sallo, in his “Avis de l’imprimeur au lecteur,” distinguished between two categories of texts: “extraits” (reviews) on the one hand, and “lettres” or “mémoires” (scientific news) on the other. In order to guarantee the ‘freedom’ of the reviewer, the “extraits” had to remain anonymous. In a letter from Jean Gallois, it is made clear that all extracts must provide information on the specific features of the book under review:
It is a good idea to make the review a little longer so that I can get to know the book better. It should note what is good or bad about the book, what the book can be used for and what profit can be made from it if it has already been written about, and make a comparison with those who have written about it before the author of this book.
In order to produce an accurate review, one must first “read carefully,” then assess the quality, usefulness and value of the book, recall previous studies on the subject and make a comparison with them. In this way, the reviews should contribute to the development of literary history (historia literaria), a reasoned history of knowledge and therefore a history of the Republic of Letters. Nevertheless, the art of reviewing remained an area of debate between several models: firstly, the ‘skeleton’ model, which retained only the structure of the book under review; secondly, the sequence of extracts from selected passages; or thirdly, the reasoned assessment of the publication. It also depended on material constraints such as the periodicity and format of the journal: should the reviews be brief and topical, or more substantial but less topical? As a result, there were not one but several arts or styles of criticism. In 1747, almost a hundred years after Denis de Sallo, Albrecht von Haller — a professor of anatomy, surgery and botany at the newly founded University of Göttingen from 1736 to 1753 — became chief editor of the Göttingische gelehrte Anzeigen (henceforth: GGA). From the outset, in the preface to the 1747 volume of the GGA, Haller defined the functions of a reviewer.6 First of all, the reviewer had to have access to a large number of recent works; he had to be familiar with many sciences and speak several languages; but as no one person could master all the sciences, the collaboration of several scholars, each covering his own special field, was necessary. A scholar who studied a work in his field had therefore to give a precise judgement, positive or negative, in the interest of the progress of science.
DOI: 10.36253/979–12–215–0573–3.03
Read Full Text: https://books.fupress.it/chapter/albrecht-von-hallers-self-reviews-and-style-of-reasoning/15851
