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...
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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 ...
Maria Lazar (1895-1948) was one of Vienna's most productive and talented novelists, poets, and dramatists in the 1920s and 1930s. Together with her husband, Friedrich Strindberg, she worked and corresponded with Elias and Veza Canetti, Karin Michaelis, Egon Fridell, Walter Benjamin, Helene Weigel and Bertolt Brecht, and many others.
This month, after half a century, her literary estate is being handed back to Vienna. As one of the principal editors, Kerstin Schütze presents the stunning story and exceptional biography of Maria Lazar and the difficulties involved in...