Programme 2023-2024

23 November 2023
5.45pm

MATTHEW BELL (London)

The Beginnings of Goethe’s Science:
A Reassessment.

This talk will consider the earliest phase of Goethe’s scientific work, from 1776 to the mid-1780s. It will examine the initial impulses that led to Goethe becoming interested in natural science and what these impulses can tell us about his scientific career as a whole. It has traditionally been assumed that the first impulse to become a scientist came when Duke Carl August directed Goethe to take control of the re-opening of the silver mines at Ilmenau in spring 1776. The plan suited his highly practical cast of mind, and accordingly a consistent strand in his scientific work was practical and less interested in (or even opposed to) theory. However, a closer look at the years between 1776 and 1780 shows that Goethe’s first steps as a scientist went through two very different phases, and the second phase, which began with his reading Buffon’s The Epochs of Nature (1778) in 1780, was at least as important as the first, practical one. The remainder of the talk will consider his reactions to Buffon and what they tell us about his scientific work more generally.

This lecture will be given in person (Senate House, Malet Street, Room G37) and will be streamed live via Zoom. Attendance is free. Advance registration is essential.

Please register HERE.

25 January 2024
5.45pm

JEROME CARROLL (Nottingham)

Crusius’ hybrid philosophy: between abstraction and actuality

(preceded by the Annual General Meeting, at 5pm, Senate House, G37)

Christian August Crusius has tended in recent assessments to be identified as a philosopher who prioritises experience or existence or actuality over logical or essentialist abstraction. Broadly speaking I agree with this assessment, but it risks ignoring the fact that his writings often accord value to the methods and fruits of abstraction, even to the extent of contradiction with his remarks on existence and actuality. The aim of this paper is two-fold: firstly, to redress the balance in readings of Crusius’ work by highlighting the several ways in which abstraction is accorded value in his writings, in terms of the aims (to establish the grounds of knowledge and experience) and methods (logic and abstraction) of philosophy; and, secondly, to explore the reasons for the ambivalence that this gives rise to. I argue that the tensions in his thinking should not be dismissed as a case of Crusius being contradictory or confused in his ideas, but rather that his approach should be characterised as hybrid, a quality which I ascribe two aspects of his ideas: firstly, Crusius’ sense of the inherent and insuperable limitations of either approach; and secondly, his sense of the complexity of reality, which limits the possibility and value of separating out necessary and contingent aspects of reality, essential from extraneous, and singular from multiple and diverse grounds.

This lecture will be given in person (Senate House, Malet Street, Room G37) and will be streamed live via Zoom. Attendance is free. Advance registration is essential.

Please register HERE.

22 February 2024
5.45pm

JENNIFER GOSETTI-FERENCEI
(Baltimore/Oxford)

Goethe, Imagination, and Literary Ecology

Recent environmentally-oriented scholarship on Goethe has focused on his conception of nature, life-oriented approach to empirical science, and observational studies of natural phenomena, while interest in the ecological themes of Goethe's literary works is also emerging. This talk will explore how ecological themes in some of Goethe's literary works can be seen in light of contemporary notions of literary ecology, and address the tension between observation and imagination in Goethe's literary description of the natural world.

This lecture will be given in person (Senate House, Malet Street, Room G37) and will be streamed live via Zoom. Attendance is free. Advance registration is essential.

Please register HERE.

14 March 2024
5.45pm

Ida Herz Lecture

KAI SINA (Muenster):

„Im Grunde Pragmatist“
Thomas Mann als politischer Aktivist

Sein Bekenntnis zur Demokratie in den Zwanzigerjahren bedeutete für Thomas Mann weit mehr als nur eine theoretische Abwendung von der konservativen Antipolitik der „Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen“. Es bedeutete eine fundamentale Neubestimmung seines Politikverständnisses im Ganzen. Unterhalb des in hohem Ton vorgetragenen Plädoyers für die Weimarer Republik in der Rede „Von deutscher Republik“, deren schwärmerischer Demokratiebegriff sich von Novalis und Walt Whitman herleitet, wandte sich Thomas Mann einer politischen Praxis zu, die für John Dewey den Kern des Demokratischen schlechthin ausmacht. Mehr als ein politisches System, mehr als Gewaltenteilung, Parlamentarismus und Rechtstaatlichkeit sei die Demokratie, schreibt Dewey, „a mode of asssociated living, of cojoint communicated experience“ und setze als solche ein ausdauerndes Mitwirken jedes und jeder Einzelnen in public affairsvoraus. Mit der Republikrede wurde Thomas Mann zur mustergültigen Verkörperung genau dieses Demokratieverständnisses.

In der Debatte um den Zionismus spiegelt sich Thomas Manns überaus facettenreiches demokratisches Handeln wie in einem Brennglas. Wie intensiv ihn die Frage über viele Jahrzehnte hinweg beschäftigte, hat man bisher – konzentriert auf seine Verteidigung der Demokratie in der Weimarer Republik, seinen Widerstand gegen den Hitlerfaschismus im Exil, sein Bemühen um europäische Aussöhnung nach 1945 – allerdings weitgehend übersehen: Früh beginnend mit seiner Mitgliedschaft in einem prozionistischen Unterstützerverein schaltete er sich immer wieder in die bis heute nachhallenden Diskussionen ein, zunächst eher zurückhaltend und abwägend, mit der Zeit immer entschiedener. Nach Kriegsende setzte er sich mit Nachdruck für die Gründung eines jüdischen Staates ein, der den Überlebenden der Shoah, deren Schrecken und Ausmaß Thomas Mann als einer der ersten Intellektuellen vor aller Welt benannt hatte, eine sichere Heimstätte bieten sollte.

Please register HERE.

25 April 2024
5.45pm

Prawer Lecture

RACHEL WONG (Chicago)

Oceanic Resonances in Schiller’s Ring des Polykrates

Inspired by recent scholarship in the “blue humanities,” this lecture explores the role of oceanic imagery in Friedrich Schiller’s “Der Ring des Polykrates” (1797). The ballad, which reworks a story from Herodotus’ Histories, recounts how a Greek king attempts to forestall divine envy by throwing his most prized possession—a signet ring—into the sea. By reconstructing Schiller’s encounter with Johann Friedrich Degen’s translation Herodots Geschichte (1783-91) and Christian Garve’s philosophical commentary “Über zwei Stellen des Herodots” (1796), I show how the ocean exerts a latent power over the human actions depicted in the poem. As a field of circulation in which Polykrates’ signet ring comes to signify both present fortune and future demise, the ocean’s uncanny ability to make diachronic events appear co-present raises the stakes of Polykrates’ actions and offers us a view of his life contained within a single, lyrical Augenblick. The lecture concludes by considering Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s one-act opera buffa of the same name, in which Schiller’s main characters are reimagined as jealous friends and the ocean’s fateful distortions of time are replaced by the humdrum rhythms of modern city life.

Please register HERE.

6 June 2024
5.45pm
Venue: German Historical Institute, 17 Bloomsbury Square, London WC1A 2NJ

Wilkinson-Willoughby Lecture

BARBARA STOLLBERG-RILINGER (Berlin)

Ein gespenstisches Welttheater? Der alte Goethe, der junge Hegel und das Ende des Römisch-deutschen Reiches.

Als Goethe sich an die feierliche Krönung Josephs II. in Frankfurt zurückerinnerte, gab es das Römisch-deutsche Reich nicht mehr. Rückblickend stilisierte er das Schauspiel, dessen Augenzeuge er als Kind gewesen war, als gespenstisches "Welttheater", das "eine gewisse Deutung verbarg, irgend ein innres Verhältnis anzeigte". Wenige Jahre zuvor hatte der junge Hegel den Deutschen vorgeworfen, sie verwechselten die uralte Krönungszeremonie aus "Aberglauben an die äußeren Formen" mit der Verfassung des Reiches selbst. Der Vortrag fragt danach, wie Goethe und Hegel die Reichsverfassung wahrnahmen und welche Rolle den symbolisch-rituellen Formen des Politischen dabei zukam.

Please register HERE.