Edmund Hardy: Religionswissenschaft als empirische Kultur- und Geisteswissenschaft

Résumé

Edmund Hardy (1852-1904) was a Catholic priest, Indologist and religious scholar in times of German Kulturkampf and colonialism. With his lecture “Einleitung in die vergleichende Religionswissenschaft” (“Introduction to Comparative Religion”) at the German University of Freiburg from 1890 and his appointment as professor for “Vergleichende Religionswissenschaft und altindische Literatur” (“Comparative Religion and Ancient Indian Literature”) in 1894 at the Swiss University of Fribourg, the young discipline took its first steps towards academic establishment in the entire German-speaking world under the term Religionswissenschaft (Science of Religion). Especially in his essay “Was ist Religionswissenschaft?” (“What is the Science of Religion?”) from 1898, Hardy defines the discipline as a strictly empirical Geisteswissenschaft and Kulturwissenschaft (humanities and cultural studies), methodologically based on historicism and on the early understanding of psychology according to Wilhelm Dilthey and Wilhelm Wundt. Just as the empirical approach of Joachim Wach, Hardy’s methodological work was hardly noticed in the long period of the phenomenology of religion. This observation leads to the fundamental question of the construction of our disciplinary history and in particular of the so-called “classics” in the study of religion.