Begriffsbildung - Begriffsgeschichte.

The article introduces two volumes of the journal with revised contributions to a conference on the formation and history of concepts in medicine and natural sciences, which took place in Heidelberg on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Society for the History of Science. The conference was to discuss to which extend the history of science has profited from a history of concepts as it had been influential in Germany from the beginning of the 1960ies onwards. The introduction reflects three strains of the history of concepts, Heinrich Rickert’s first approach, dating from 1896, the 1960ies with the so called Begriffsgeschichte, and recent impulses and irritations, that derive from the practical turn.
At the peak of an era of belief in scientific progress, in 1896, the philosopher Heinrich Rickert published a two volume treatise on the Limits of Concept Formation in Natural Science. He claimed that also a current scientific knowledge, may it be based on a general law of nature or a mathematical array, had to be seen as an object of history. The history of concepts, in its German setting of the 1960ies and 70ies was framed by a worshiping of concepts in the more narrow sense of concepts that are being conveyed by language. The history of science though found its most productive approaches in laboratory studies and epistemology. Only recently the prospects of merging linguistic- and practical turn are being evaluated. The introduction ends with brief comprehensions of this volume's papers, relating them to the broader topic of the conference.