Margarita Kranz

Initiated by Erich Rothacker, a »Kommission für Begriffsgeschichte« was founded by the German Research Foundation and chaired by Hans-Georg Gadamer to establish Begriffsgeschichte as a common method for several disciplines of the humanities. On the basis of unpublished correspondence the article describes the organization of activities of the commission up to its end in 1966, i.e. before in 1971 the first volumes of the two great dictionaries of conceptual history were published, and offers a documentation of the discussions during the conferences, preserved in the archives of the DFG. An analysis of the documents reveals that the participants' approach to textual material was somehow arbitrary regarding conceptual history. It therefore provided no substantial support or inspiration for the two dictionaries in course and failed to engage in general reflection on Begriffsgeschichte which could have helped to establish it methodologically.

The Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur at Mayence, founded in 1949, installed a project for a Dictionary of concepts under the direction of Erich Rothacker, who, during the 1920s, had planned such a dictionary for the terminology of the Geisteswissenschaften in various approaches. The drafts and presentations of the project, among them a lecture, held in 1927 at the Bibliothek Warburg in Hamburg, are presented here for the first time. It is shown in which way Rothacker's dictionary project failed, was substituted by the Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte and finally by Joachim Ritter's Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie. Though originally not linked with Rothacker, Ritter's Wörterbuch was 1974 until its completion as well institutionally supervised and fostered by the Academie Mayence and its Commission for Philosophy. In this institutional perspective the connections between the protagonists of the rising history of concepts in philosophy come out in their complexity. Hans Blumenberg's role for the history of concepts as Rothackers successor in the Academie is here documented for the first time.

The multivolume Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie counts as a pioneering reference work in the historiography of concepts both in philosophy and neighboring disciplines. Its beginnings lie in the late 1950s and early 1960s when ambitious assistants of the Münster philosopher Joachim Ritter launched it as a collaborative and comparatively non-hierarchical endeavor of themselves and their academic teacher. This contribution documents a 1958 memorandum that advertises the project to a German publisher as well as minutes of an editorial meeting held in July 1959 between Joachim Ritter and his assistants. In the light of these previously unpublished documents the eminent role of Hermann Lübbe, Karlfried Gründer and Robert Spaemann in planning and starting the project is thrown into relief.