Another post from my lengthening backlog...
The Lloyd International Honors College at UNCG hosts an event they call "Food for Thought," which brings UNCG scholars to speak about lively topics. I had never attended, but I saw the title for the February 11 talk, "Visions, Dreams, and Divinations: Literature and Science around 1800," and was intrigued by the fact that a visiting German scholar, Susanne Gomoluch, was speaking. Apart from my interest in the history of science, I've spent quite a bit of time in Germany, so, my interest piqued, I went.
She began by providing some historical background, and the political situation in Germany during the late 18th and early 19th century is particularly critical. At the time, what is now Germany was a loose confederation of autonomous states and principalities that was, until 1806 when it was dissolved by Napoleon, the Holy Roman Empire. This was followed by several loosely affiliated German confederations until the eventual unification of Germany under a single government in 1871.
The looseness of the political arrangement is important in this context because there simply was no unified policy towards anything. Germany lagged behind Great Britain and France in industrialization, for example, largely because of this lack of centralized decision-making. This also meant, though, that a diversity of perspectives on science emerged in the German states. Dr. Gomoluch spoke about a number of interesting issues, but the most fascinating was a character named Karl Phillip Moritz (1756-1793). Moritz, among other things, was a high school teacher, professor of archaeology and, most pertinent here, the editor of Das Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde als ein Lesebuch für Gelehrte und Ungelehrte (The Magazine of Experiential Psychology as a Reader for Scholars and Laymen), which was one of Germany's first journals of psychology. The journal featured much early work on mental pathology, deaf studies, social deviance, and the interpretation of dreams.The Lloyd International Honors College at UNCG hosts an event they call "Food for Thought," which brings UNCG scholars to speak about lively topics. I had never attended, but I saw the title for the February 11 talk, "Visions, Dreams, and Divinations: Literature and Science around 1800," and was intrigued by the fact that a visiting German scholar, Susanne Gomoluch, was speaking. Apart from my interest in the history of science, I've spent quite a bit of time in Germany, so, my interest piqued, I went.
She began by providing some historical background, and the political situation in Germany during the late 18th and early 19th century is particularly critical. At the time, what is now Germany was a loose confederation of autonomous states and principalities that was, until 1806 when it was dissolved by Napoleon, the Holy Roman Empire. This was followed by several loosely affiliated German confederations until the eventual unification of Germany under a single government in 1871.
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| Holy Roman Empire in 1789. By Robert Alfers via Wikipedia. |
An interesting presentation, and LIHC also provides a pretty nice spread of food...
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