The culture of the present

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The book series "Die Kultur der Gegenwart" - published from 1905 to 1926 - is a multi-volume overview of all areas of knowledge and science, written by German-speaking authors. It was edited by the publicist Paul Hinneberg and was published by Teubner Verlag , Leipzig.

Conception of the "culture of the present"

With the major work "The Culture of the Present", the epistemological approach of the Encyclopédie was to be realized again with the then current state of knowledge. This was also based on the requirement to document Germany's cultural leadership within Europe. The most important scientists and engineers of the German-speaking area (including Austria) should formally and uniformly present the status of their fields of knowledge in popular science. All areas of science should be included, especially without separating the humanities and natural sciences.

The editor described the program as follows:

The “culture of the present” is intended to present a systematically structured, historically founded overall presentation of our present-day culture by presenting the fundamental results of the individual cultural areas according to their importance for the entire culture of the present and for its further development. The work unites a number of first names from all areas of science and practice and offers representations of the individual areas each from the pen of the person who is called to do so in a commonly understood, artistically chosen language in a tight space.

System and structure

The project was based on around 60 volumes, the first volumes appeared from 1905. However, it could not be completed because of the First World War and inflation . Individual volumes were published in second and third editions, some of which were considerably revised or expanded until 1926.

The whole of the subject area "culture" was divided by the editor into three "cultural areas" to delimit the individual areas of presentation, the group of the humanities, the mathematical-scientific and the technical areas of knowledge. The dominance of humanities topics made a further subdivision of this area necessary, so that the entire work should be divided into four "parts":

  • Part I: The humanities cultural areas (1st half: religion and philosophy, literature, music and art); with a preceding introduction to the complete works (planned: 14 volumes);
  • Part II: The humanities cultural areas (2nd half: State and society, law and economy) (planned: 10 volumes);
  • III. Part: The mathematical, scientific and medical cultural areas (planned: 19 volumes);
  • IV. Part: The technical cultural areas (planned: 18 volumes).

See also

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Vol. 3,4,2,1: Mathematics, natural sciences, medicine - organic natural sciences - cell and tissue theory, morphology and history of development - botanical part, countless pages before the foreword. Digitized with an overview of the planned volumes (Images 6 and 7): Biodiversity Heritage Library , archive.org