This configuration, however, proved difficult to sustain because, ironically enough, it was so successful in helping to establish the research seminar as the center of university education.☉ As academic disciplines grew to be more specialized and professionalized, they veered toward insularity and fragmentation. And philology led the way. It was the philologist August Böckh Encycloreader August Böckh or Boeckh (/bɜːrk/; German: [bœk]; 24 November 1785 – 3 August 1867) was a German classical scholar and antiquarian. Böckh worked out the ideas of Wolf in regard to philology and illustrated them by his practice. Discarding the old idea that philology consisted in a minute acquaintance with words and the exercise of the critical art, he regarded it as the entire knowledge of antiquity (totius antiquitatis cognitio), historical and philosophical. who, in 1812, launched the modern research seminar.
As a fault of cowriting, I include these passages from the original text and juxtapose them in parallel with a sidenote to highlight the not necessarily contradictory but editorially unreconciled statements about research seminars’ origins that serves as a metanarrative example of the knowledge fragmentation in question.