The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science mourns the loss of Renate Wahsner, who passed away on 22 January 2026. Her passing marks the loss of a scholar whose work over many years made a distinctive and intellectually rigorous contribution to the history and philosophy of the natural sciences.

Renate Wahsner joined the Institute in 1995 as a senior research scholar in the department led by Jürgen Renn, contributing work that addressed foundational questions concerning the conceptual structure of modern science. Her work was marked by sustained engagement with German Idealism—above all Hegel—and with its relevance for understanding the epistemological status of physics from the early modern period to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

A central theme of her research was the relationship between philosophy and the natural sciences. Wahsner repeatedly challenged simplistic narratives of a clean separation between scientific practice and philosophical reflection. Through detailed historical and conceptual analysis, she explored topics such as Newtonianism, mechanistic and organicist worldviews, the notion of natural law, the problem of objectivity, and the role of metaphysics in scientific knowledge. Figures such as Newton, Kant, Mach, Voltaire, Maupertuis, Wolff, and Hegel played a central role in her work—not as isolated thinkers, but as participants in long-term debates about the nature of scientific explanation.

Many of her publications were characterized by an unusual combination of philosophical depth and attentiveness to the internal logic of scientific theories. Her writings resisted fashionable simplifications and instead insisted on conceptual precision, historical responsibility, and a critical stance toward both positivist and purely speculative approaches.

Within the intellectual landscape of the Institute, Renate Wahsner represented a voice that persistently asked fundamental questions: about the meaning of scientific concepts, about the historical conditions of their formation, and about the limits of scientific knowledge itself. Her work remains an important reference point for scholars interested in the philosophical dimensions of the history of science.

The Institute remembers Renate Wahsner and honors her lasting contribution to the intellectual life of the Institute. We extend our deepest condolences to her family, friends, and colleagues.