Über das Lexikon
The Goethe-Lexicon of Philosophical Concepts (GLPC) is a collaborative research initiative investigating the central role played by concepts and their re-invention in Goethe’s “heterodox” development as a philosopher. By drawing on digital technologies the project’s international team of cross-disciplinary collaborators will collate a collection of concepts that, when taken together, allowed Goethe to reformulate the central questions of traditional philosophy.
As a dynamic reference work hosted by the University of Pittsburgh Library System (ULS), the GLPC uses the Open Journal Systems (OJS) platform to publish installments of peer-reviewed lexicon entries, thereby enabling a mapping of Goethe’s philosophical heterodoxies.
All of the completed entries will be made available quarterly, and curated collections of concepts will also be published from time to time (e.g., signature concepts; conceptual networks; concepts drawn from theology, ethics, ontology, aesthetics, etc.).
About Goethe
No entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy considers the philosophical importance of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), whose literary, scientific, and theoretical/critical writings fill more than 143 volumes in the famous Weimar edition of his works (1887–1919). Yet the author of Faust, which Hegel described as “an absolute philosophical tragedy,” was philosophically engaged throughout his entire creative life, which extended from the Seven Years’ War (1756–63) and the coronation of Joseph II as Holy Roman Emperor (1765) through the French Revolution (1789) and its aftermath to the early Industrial Revolution. Along with accounts of these “world-historical” events in Goethe’s autobiographical writings, moreover, we can find a record of his formative encounters with philosophers: from Plato and Aristotle through the Stoics to Spinoza and Leibniz, and from these antecedents on to Kant and his successors, including Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. Significantly, Goethe conducted a lifelong conversation with such philosophical friends and adversaries as he developed his own heterodox mode of thought that aligns with Richard Rorty’s anti-foundational tradition of ‘edifying’ (i.e., non-systematic) philosophers like Emerson, Dewey, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Whitehead, and Deleuze. For a concise, philosophically oriented, biography of Goethe, see the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Why Goethe?
The Goethe-Lexicon of Philosophical Concepts (GLPC) aims to demonstrate the unique contribution that Goethe made to developments in modern and contemporary philosophy. The entries published in the GLPC, which include traditional as well as non-traditional concepts—ranging from Ach (Ah, Alas) to Zusammenhang (Nexus)—highlight Goethe’s unique way of philosophizing, which typically challenged non-dialectical oppositions and rigid systems of thinking by speaking across traditional disciplinary divides while still respecting their individual protocols.
As universities around the world seek to establish dialogues between the humanities and the social and natural sciences, Goethe’s conceptual dynamism and the cross-disciplinary conversations it facilitates make his creative experiment in philosophical thinking appear remarkably attuned to some of the most pressing institutional issues of our time. Indeed, “thinking with Goethe,” in this context, does not require us to choose between either materialist and idealist, scientific and humanist, or presentist and historical approaches to the fundamental problems of our time. By elaborating the special kind of philosophical work that the writer’s literary, scientific, and critical experiments in conceptualization model, we hope that our lexicon will not only become an indispensable research tool for Goethe scholars, but also contribute to the construction of the inter- and transdisciplinary global networks of thought that are one of today’s most pressing intellectual challenges.
About the Lexicon
The GLPC is a collaborative research initiative investigating the central role played by concepts and their re-invention in Goethe’s “heterodox” development as a philosopher. As a digital humanities research initiative, the GLPC positions users to understand Goethe’s thought in all its breadth and variety and to connect it to an exemplary line of philosophical predecessors, contemporaries, and successors. The project’s international team of cross-disciplinary collaborators works to identify, connect, and explicate a network of almost 400 philosophical concepts that allowed Goethe to reformulate central questions of traditional metaphysics, ethics, epistemology, theology, and aesthetics.
By publishing the lexicon online as an open-access research tool with a cross-disciplinary focus, we seek to foster crucial transatlantic ties between Anglophone German Studies and German Studies in Germany and to make innovative aspects of Goethe’s thought available to a global readership and authorship beyond the German-speaking world. We are proud to offer contributions by British, Canadian, German, Italian, South African, Swiss, and U.S. scholars. Our project also serves as a resource for scholars outside the disciplinary confines of German Studies by connecting their work to a thinker who has remained largely unacknowledged for his philosophical achievements.
Furthermore, as a materialization of the kind of philosophizing the lexicon presents, its digital platform allows users to reorganize its sequence of entries with the stroke of a key and thus empowers them to experience the basic building blocks of Goethean thought across a dynamic network of contextual fields. While other dictionaries and compendia of Goethe’s works are available, the GLPC differs dramatically from them in offering not lists of word-occurrences throughout his oeuvre, but, rather, entries that are interpretive explorations of how, in the philosophically dynamic decades around 1800, Goethe re-conceived traditional concepts in his heterodox fashion and even creatively minted his own: the GLPC, we hope, offers its users a platform to facilitate the same kind of conceptual work.
Project and Grant History
The idea for a Goethe-Lexicon of Philosophical Concepts was launched in 2017 by Clark Muenzer during his Presidential Forum presentation to the Goethe Society of North America’s Atkins Conference. Encouraged by informal conversations with colleagues there, Clark applied for and won a collaborative research grant at his home institution (University of Pittsburgh), which provided two years of seed funding ($50,000) from 2018-2020 and established the University of Pittsburgh as the project’s home. Since then, the project’s scope and team have expanded with generous support from additional grants and institutional benefactors.
In 2018–19, John H. Smith (UC Irvine), Bryan Klausmeyer (Virginia Tech), and Daniel Carranza (then University of Chicago, now Harvard University) joined the lexicon’s editorial team. In close collaboration with the University Library System (ULS) of the University of Pittsburgh, the open-source software Open Journal Systems (OJS), created by the Public Knowledge Project (PKP), was chosen as the the publishing platform, and a website was launched in 2019 following lexicon’s first international workshop, which took place at the University of Pittsburgh that spring. The discussions held at the workshop helped establish the project’s basic contours, including its scope, audience, and the roles of secondary literature and interpretation in the entries. The workshop-presentations also laid the groundwork for the publication of the GLPC’s first installment, which went online in February 2021.
In 2020, John H. Smith was awarded a School of Humanities Digital Scholarly Projects Planning & Proof-of-Concept Grant at the University of California, Irvine, to support a variety of activities related to the lexicon project and to serve as a springboard for future grant applications.
In July 2021, our second international workshop, which was originally planned to take place at the University of Cambridge (England), became a Zoom-event due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Many of the papers presented during the three-day event were subsequently published in the second installment of lexicon entries, which appeared in November 2021. In the Fall of the same year, the GLPC also organized a seminar at the German Studies Association (Indianapolis, IN) and a panel series at the Atkins Conference of the Goethe Society of North America (Chicago, IL). Jenni Caisley (Cambridge University/Independent Scholar) and Margaret Strair (Bryn Mawr College) also joined the editorial team.
In 2022, the editors published a summary of the lexicon-project in the Goethe Jahrbuch, and a third international Zoom-workshop was held in the Spring of 2023 under the auspices of the University of Toronto, and a second GSA-seminar has been planned for 2025. In that same year, the GLPC became a registered 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, which enables it to receive tax-deductible charitable contributions. In December 2022, the GLPC also published its third installment of lexicon entries and in 2024 its fourth installment.
In addition to the Chancellor’s Grant at the University of Pittsburgh and the School of Humanities Scholarly Projects at UC Irvine, the GLPC has received financial support from the Goethe Society of North America (GSNA), which makes yearly contributions, as well as from the English Goethe Society (EGS).
Financial Support
While the GLPC, as an open access publication, is available to all users without any fees, it does depend on both institutional and individual contributions to cover publications costs, which amount to about $300 for each entry (or approximately $3,000/year). If you would like to support this project with a donation or put us in contact with a potential benefactor, please contact Clark S. Muenzer or click here to make a donation.
The publication of the Goethe-Lexicon of Philosophical Concept would not be possible without the generous financial support of the Goethe Society of North America.