Readings in Goethean Science

Readings in Goethean Science

Author: Herbert Hans Koepf

Publisher: SteinerBooks

Published: 1978-01-15

Total Pages: 72

ISBN-13: 1621511944

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An introduction to Goethe's natural scientific writings, this book provides an alternative approach to "a science of living nature," one that goes beyond simple numbers and measurements. Goethe's development of morphological thought is a disciplined methodology that provides such an alternative. Through such observation, we can being to see the essence of living nature. Rudolf Steiner derived his theory of knowledge from Goethe's practice of natural science - and hence our understanding of biodynamic agriculture is tied to Goethe's approach. This book contains five writings by Goethe, as well as two by Rudolf Steiner.


Taking Appearance Seriously

Taking Appearance Seriously

Author: Henri Bortoft

Publisher: Floris Books

Published: 2012-10-25

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 0863159680

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The history of western metaphysi from Plato onwards is dominated by the dualism of being and appearance. What something really is (its true being) is believed to be hidden behind the 'mere appearances' through which it manifests. Twentieth-century European thinkers radically overturned this foundation. With Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer came a major step towards taking appearance seriously, exploring a way of seeing that draws attention back 'upstream', from what is experienced into the act of experiencing. Understood in this way, perception is a dynamic event, a 'phenomenon', in which the observer participates. Henri Bortoft guides us through this dynamic way of seeing in various areas of experience -- in distinguishing things, the finding of meaning, and the relationship between thought and words. He also explores similarities with Goethe's reflections on the coming-into-being of the living plant. Here, in another reversal of classical thinking, we find that even in their 'diversity of appeareances', living things are not separate but in relation. Diversity is the dynamic unity of life itself. Expanding the scope of his previous book, The Wholeness of Nature, the author shows how Goethean insights combine with the dynamic way of seeing in continental philosophy to offer us an actively experienced 'life of meaning'. This book will be of interest to anyone who wants to understand the contribution and wider implications of modern European thought in the world today.


Goethe the Alchemist

Goethe the Alchemist

Author: Ronald Douglas Gray

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2010-06-17

Total Pages: 334

ISBN-13: 110801528X

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This 1952 study analyses Goethe's writings in the light of his youthful readings in alchemy.


German Romanticism and Science

German Romanticism and Science

Author: Jocelyn Holland

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2009-04-30

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 113585016X

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Situated at the intersection of literature and science, Holland's study draws upon a diverse corpus of literary and scientific texts which testify to a cultural fascination with procreation around 1800. Through readings which range from Goethe’s writing on metamorphosis to Novalis’s aphorisms and novels and Ritter’s Fragments from the Estate of a Young Physicist, Holland proposes that each author contributes to a scientifically-informed poetics of procreation. Rather than subscribing to a single biological theory (such as epigenesis or preformation), these authors take their inspiration from a wide inventory of procreative motifs and imagery.


Faust

Faust

Author: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Publisher:

Published: 1887

Total Pages: 890

ISBN-13:

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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Author: Jeremy Adler

Publisher: Reaktion Books

Published: 2020-03-16

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 1789142539

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This new critical biography provides a complete picture of German novelist, playwright, and poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Offering fresh, thought-provoking interpretations of all Goethe’s major works, including novels such as The Sorrows of Young Werther and The Elective Affinities, plays such as Egmont and Iphigenia in Tauris, and Goethe’s greatest work, Faust, Jeremy Adler also provides many original readings of Goethe’s poetry, beginning with the poems written in his early youth. Alongside Goethe’s work, Adler analyzes the incidents of his life, including his love affairs and his meetings with the luminaries of his age, such as Napoleon Bonaparte. Uniquely, Adler also shows how Goethe’s encyclopedic interest in literature, science, philosophy, law, and many other fields became important for a wide range of later scientists and thinkers. Among the figures he influenced were Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein, Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, Émile Durkheim and Susan Sontag. Goethe has often been called the last Renaissance man. This biography shows that Goethe was in fact the first of the moderns—a maker of modernity.


Literature and Weather

Literature and Weather

Author: Johannes Ungelenk

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2018-02-19

Total Pages: 600

ISBN-13: 3110560976

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"Literature and Weather. Shakespeare – Goethe – Zola" is dedicated to the relation between literature and weather, i.e. a cultural practice and an everyday phenomenon that has played very different epistemic roles in the history of the world. The study undertakes an archaeology of literature’s affinity to the weather which tells the story of literature’s weathery self-reflection and its creative reinventions as a medium in different epistemic and social circumstances. The book undertakes extensive close readings of three exemplary literary texts: Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Goethe’s The Sufferings of Young Werther and Zola’s The Rougon-Macquarts. These readings provide the basis for reconstructing three distinct formations, negotiating the relationship between literature and weather in the 17th, the 18th and the 19th centuries. The study is a pioneering contribution to the recent debates of literature’s indebtedness to the environment. It initiates a rewriting of literary history that is weather-sensitive; the question of literature’s agency, its power to affect, cannot be raised without understanding the way the weather works in a certain cultural formation.


Goethe's Concept of the Daemonic

Goethe's Concept of the Daemonic

Author: Angus James Nicholls

Publisher: Camden House

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 9781571133076

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The first book to examine Goethe's writings on the daemonic in relation to both Classical philosophy and German Idealism. For Plato, the daemonic is a sensibility that brings individuals into contact with divine knowledge; Socrates was also inspired by a "divine voice" known as his "daimonion." Goethe was introduced to this ancient concept by Hamannand Herder, who associated it with the aesthetic category of genius. This book shows how the young Goethe depicted the idea of daemonic genius in works of the Storm and Stress period, before exploring the daemonic in a series of later poetic and autobiographical works. Reading Goethe's works on the daemonic through theorists such as Lukács, Benjamin, Gadamer, Adorno, and Blumenberg, Nicholls contends that they contain arguments concerning reason, nature, and subjectivity that are central to both European Romanticism and the Enlightenment. Angus Nicholls is Claussen-Simon Foundation Research Lecturer in German and Comparative Literature at the Centre for Anglo-German Cultural Relations in the Department of German, Queen Mary, University of London.