"Room of Prof. Dr.

Lübbe becomes the Eisler office.” Margarita Kranz quotes this entry in the minutes from December 12, 1963 from the files of the University of Münster in the “Archive for Conceptual History” in an essay on the birth of the Historical Dictionary of Philosophy.

Hermann Lübbe, who accepted a professorship at the new Ruhr University in Bochum in 1963, celebrated his ninety-fifth year on December 31, 2021.

The "Archive" dedicates the second issue of its sixty-third volume to him.

Kranz's study offers the documentary-positivist complement to three explanatory treatises on Lübbe's terminology.

Jens Hacke recapitulates Lübbe's understanding of the Enlightenment, Uwe Justus Wenzel examines Lübbe's concept of philosophy in a critical comparison with Lübbe's own definitions of the opposite concepts of world view and ideology,

Patrick Bahners

Feuilleton correspondent in Cologne and responsible for "Humanities".

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The office of the editor of the historical dictionary was referred to as the Eisler office in the correspondence of the editorial team, because the company operated as a revision of Rudolf Eisler's dictionary of philosophical terms.

The subtitle of the encyclopedia published by Schwabe in Basel, the first volume of which appeared in 1971, is corresponding.

In 1958 Schwabe acquired the rights to Eisler's dictionary, the first edition of which dates from 1899;

for half a century, until 2007, royalties were paid.

According to Kranz, apart from the official subtitle and a reference in the foreword by the general editor Joachim Ritter, there is no trace of the predecessor in the complete work.

An apodictic departure

Even the first concept, an “expert report on the plan for a 'Historical Dictionary of Philosophy'” written by Karlfried Gründer and Robert Spaemann, which Kranz prints, had stated apodictically, with the exuberance of a generation's new beginnings: “The occasionally occurring thought that Eisler new It is completely wrong to put it up.” It is all the more remarkable that Kranz pointed out that not only in the correspondence with the publisher but also in the internal communication of the dictionary makers there was constant mention of “Eisler meetings” and “Eisler conferences”.

According to Kranz, the "name Eisler" functioned "as a shell for a long-prepared new content".

The intellectual history of the Federal Republic, inspired by ideas from Münster, provides the concept of reoccupation for such a relationship between a linguistic shell and a new thing.

The name could continue to serve institutional purposes, although experts saw through it as anachronistic.

The anonymous experts Gründer and Spaemann commented in the undated paper, probably intended for submission to Kohlhammer-Verlag, Spaemann's former employer, about a plan that they had worked out themselves with colleagues from Münster.

Lübbe established contact with Schwabe.

On a postcard dated April 7, 1959, a confidant of Christian Overstolz, the head of the Schwabe publishing house, reported that he had visited the seminar in Münster, which was "very suitable" for "the realization of Mr. Lübbe's Eisler plan".

Lübbe did not claim the copyright to the plan.

Two and a half months later he wrote to Overstolz: "I have the strong impression that Professor Ritter is very interested in your plan to publish a revised Eisler."

Thwarting the routines of school wisdom

Lübbe became a co-editor, but, as Hacke notes, contributed only a few of his own building blocks to articles, under the keywords "stories" and "time/time use".

He used his time other than organizing the evidence for big-concept developments a la progress, religion, and enlightenment.

As questionable about Eisler's approach, the expert opinion assessed "the principle" of "explaining the terms only through definitions" and "the dogmatic way in which highly questionable personal definitions are placed at the beginning of each article".

As a characteristic means of Lübbe's "presence rhetoric", Mehring names neologisms that serve to thwart the routines of school wisdom.

Lübbe sends his terms into the world with their own definitions, i.e. with scientific claims.

Was the eviction of the office accompanied by an inner distancing of Lübbe from the Munster Post-Eisler?

From Lübbe's undaunted functionalist perspective, the thirteenth volume of the historical dictionary of philosophy, completed in 2007, is more likely to be imagined as an office whose equipment can prove useful for work of which the planners had no idea.