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Humboldt University of Berlin

Humboldt-Universität Berlin · Public domain · source

Overview

The Humboldt University of Berlin (German: Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, abbreviated HU Berlin) is a public research university in the central borough of Mitte in Berlin, Germany.

The university was established by Frederick William III on the initiative of Wilhelm von Humboldt, Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher as the University of Berlin (Universität zu Berlin) in 1809, and opened in 1810. From 1828 until its closure in 1945, it was named the (Royal) Friedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin (FWU Berlin; German: Königliche Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Berlin). During the Cold War, the university found itself in East Berlin and was de facto split in two when the Free University of Berlin opened in West Berlin. The university received its current name in honour of Alexander and Wilhelm von Humboldt in 1949.

The university is divided into nine faculties, including its medical school shared with the Freie Universität Berlin. The university has a student enrollment of around 35,000 students, and offers degree programs in some 171 disciplines from undergraduate to post-doctorate level. Its main campus is located on the Unter den Linden boulevard in central Berlin. The university is known worldwide for pioneering the Humboldtian model of higher education, which has strongly influenced other European and Western universities.

It is generally regarded as having been the world's preeminent university for the natural sciences during the 19th and early 20th centuries; it is linked to major breakthroughs in physics and other sciences by its professors, such as Albert Einstein. Past and present faculty and notable alumni include 57 Nobel Prize laureates (the most of any German university), as well as scholars and academics including Johannes Müller, Theodor Schwann, Rudolf Virchow, Hermann von Helmholtz, Emil du Bois-Reymond, Robert Koch, Theodor Mommsen, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Otto von Bismarck, W. E. B. Du Bois, Arthur Schopenhauer, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Jacob Burckhardt, Walter Benjamin, Max Weber, Georg Simmel, Karl Liebknecht, Ernst Cassirer, Heinrich Heine, Ivan Turgenev, Eduard Fraenkel, Max Planck, Wernher von Braun and the Brothers Grimm.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

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I must call attention to the fact, by the way, that the views here set out were, for by far the most part, developed and established by Marx, and only to a very slight degree by myself, so that it is understood that I have not represented them without his knowledge. I read the entire manuscript to him before sending it to press and the tenth chapter of the section on Political Economy was written by Marx and…
Friedrich Engels, Landmarks of Scientific Socialism
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To the ordinary physicist the so-called _Actio in distans_ was a hopeless stumbling-block. If he did not comprehend the transmission (as it is called) of force where there was immediate contact, he was at least perfectly familiar with the outer aspect of it as a condition of his limited experience. It needed one beyond the mere hodman of science to say with Laplace: “We are so far from knowing all the agents of…
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel's Philosophy of Mind
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The English call physical instruments, such as the barometer and thermometer, philosophical instruments. Theories too, and especially morality and the moral sciences, which are derived from the feelings of the human heart or from experience, are called Philosophy, and finally this is also so with the theories and principles of Political Economy. And thus at least in England, is the name of Philosophy respected. Some…
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy
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Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard

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Part of German philosophy.

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