“This is the science that concerns itself with plants in their local association in the various climates. This science, as vast as its object, paints with a broad brush the immense space occupied by plants, from the regions of perpetual snows to the bottom of the ocean, and into the very interior of the earth, where there subsist in obscure caves some cryptogams that are as little known as the insects feeding upon them.”

during the first decades of the 19th century, Alexander von Humboldt was the second-most famous person in the world after Napoleon.

Humboldt represents the road not taken. He was a scientist who saw everything as interconnected. He called for good global stewardship and objected to the careless exploitation of resources. His warnings weren’t heeded.

Humboldt was an environmental scientist even before the words environment or ecology were coined (1827 and 1875, respectively).

One of his most famous students was Alexander von Humboldt, who thanked his mentor Lichtenberg with these words: “I do not merely regard the sum of positive insights that I was able to gather from what you told me – what I value even more is the general direction that my train of thoughts took under your guidance. Truth in itself is precious, but even more precious is the skill to find it.”

Cosmos was unlike any previous book about nature. Humboldt took his readers on a journey from outer space to earth, and then from the surface of the planet into its inner core.

When I started working on the history of linguistics — which had been totally forgotten; nobody knew about it — I discovered all sorts of things. One of the things I came across was Wilhelm von Humboldt’s very interesting work. One part of it that has since become famous is his statement that language “makes infinite use of finite means.” It’s often thought that we have answered that question with Turing computability and generative grammar, but we haven’t. He was talking about infinite use, not the generative capacity. Yes, we can understand the generation of the expressions that we use, but we don’t understand how we use them. Why do we decide to say this and not something else? In our normal interactions, why do we convey the inner workings of our minds to others in a particular way? Nobody understands that. So, the infinite use of language remains a mystery, as it always has. Humboldt’s aphorism is constantly quoted, but the depth of the problem it formulates is not always recognized.

Saussure echoed an important critique of Humbold-tian linguistic theory by the distinguished American linguist William DwightWhitney, who evidently greatly influenced Saussure.

To use the terminology Wilhelm von Hum-boldt used in the 1830s, the speaker makes infinite use of finite means. Hisgrammar must, then, contain a finite system of rules that generates infinitelymany deep and surface structures, appropriately related. I

Offensichtlich ist aber das menschliche Erkenntnisvermö-gen eine Kraft im humboldtschen Sinne

Aufgrund des historisch-systematischen Stellenwerts, kann man alsoHumboldts Bildungskonzeption als einen minimalen semantischen Kernbezeichnen

Bildung ist ein Prozess, sich zu einem je schon gegebenen Selbst-Welt-Verhältnis auf allgemeinste, regeste und freieste Art und Weise insVerhältnis zu setzen.

Man kann sich zu dem je schongegebenen Selbst-Welt-Verhältnis erneut verhalten, indem man es bejahtoder ablehnt, verstärkt oder ändert.

Die letzte Aufgabe unsres Daseyns: dem Begriff der Menschheit inunsrer Person, sowohl während der Zeit unsres Lebens, als auchnoch über dasselbe hinaus, durch die Spuren des lebendigen Wir-kens, die wir zurücklassen, einen so großen Inhalt, als möglich,zu verschaffen, diese Aufgabe löst sich allein durch die Verknüp-fung unsres Ichs mit der Welt zu der allgemeinsten, regesten undfreiesten Wechselwirkung

Wilhelmvon Humboldts ein zentraler Ausgangs- und Anknüpfungspunkt:In Anlehnung an Wilhelm von Humboldt kann man davon ausge-hen, dass jedes Verständnis von Bildung, ungeachtet der Gewich-tung und Nuancierungen [. . . ], die Beziehung und Verhältnisse zurSprache bringt, die – erstens – Menschen zu sich selbst, – zweitens– zu ihren Mitmenschen und – drittens – zum Gesamt der Welteingehen bzw. eingegangen sind

skill means I know how to read 00:10:56 and write but social means I'm also able to participate in the community of literate and and this goes for all sorts of literacies not just alphabetic literacy

But, as Wilhelm von Humboldt, founder of theHumboldt University of Berlin and brother to the great explorerAlexander von Humboldt, put it, the professor is not there for thestudent and the student not for the professor. Both are only there forthe truth. And truth is always a public matter.

Alexander von Humboldt, one of the world's greatest scientists, pioneered the idea nearly 200 years ago, in 1828!

A doctrine of signification will not emerge automatically even if we make a comprehensive comparison of as many languages as possible, and those which are most exotic. To accept, let us say, the philosophical horizon within which W. von Humboldt made language a problem, would be no less inadequate. The doctrine of signification is rooted in the ontology of Dasein. Whether it prospers or decays depends on the fate of this ontology.x