Why did Wernher von Braun and Norbert Wiener write novels and stories? Based on the fiction of the so-called "father of the American lunar program," and of the founder of cybernetics, this lecture explores the peculiar phenomenon wherein some scientists-- who played a leading role in launching the technical achievements of the 20th century-- engaged in literary avocations. The fact that they wrote at all is as significant as the works themselves. This talk asks about the place that literature plays within the rocketry of von Braun and the cybernetics of Wiener. In what ways does...
In 1931, Max Horkheimer proposed a model of interdisciplinary research that remains a benchmark for understanding how cultures function and might function better. He imagined an institute “in which philosophers, sociologists, economists, historians, and psychologists are brought together in permanent collaboration” (Horkheimer 1993, 9). The institute would not work with a single theory but would let data lead to new hypotheses (Horkheimer 1993, 10). But the work of Horkheimer and colleagues rarely lived up to the 1931 vision of an interdisciplinary, empirically grounded approach to...
Join us for late lunch & cakes and find out more about Germanic languages, our concentrations and secondary field, and study and work abroad opportunities.
In her blog-novel Ich in Gelb (“Me in Yellow,” 2015), Olga Flor depicts an odd couple that becomes a hybrid creature, at once worm and woman. How, the novel prompts the reader to ask, might a new understanding of parasitic life-forms and their relation to human bodies help to...
Since the early 2000s, researchers in the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities have been discussing an ongoing paradigm shift in the consideration of animals. This paradigm shift directly affects the way laboratory animals are perceived in contemporary discourses: Not only is knowledge produced by and with them, but laboratory animals simultaneously possess interaction potential, sociality, and agency. Consequently, several contradictory animal orders emerge in animal experimentation (Knorr-Cetina): The laboratory animal as a naturalistic and analytical body (Lynch), as a... Read more about Germanic Forum: Vera Thomann (Zürich) - “Animal Experiments in Contemporary German Literature”
In “Über Wahrheit und Lüge im außermoralischen Sinne” (1873), Friedrich Nietzsche offers a fascinating but convoluted theory of the ontogenesis of language and the mentalia involved therein. I argue that his concept of Anschauungsmetapher (perceptual metaphor) allows for a logical explanation of the relationship between mind, world, and language. As I put this text in a dialogue with Aristotle’s and Kant’s philosophies, theories of abduction, and the neuroscientific hypothesis of semantic alignment, I will throw light on Nietzsche’s Anschauungsmetapher ...