The early history of embodied cognition from 1740-1920 : the Lebenskraft-debate and radical reality in German (medical) science, music, and literature / edited by John A. McCarthy.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

McCarthy, John A. (John Aloysius), 1942-2022, editor.

Series:

Internationale Forschungen zur allgemeinen und vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft ; Volume 189.

Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft, 0929-6999 ; Volume 189

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Comparative literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (357 p.)

Place of Publication:

Leiden, Netherlands ; Boston, Massachusetts : Brill-Rodopi, 2016.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

This pioneering book evaluates the early history of embodied cognition. It explores for the first time the life-force ( Lebenskraft ) debate in Germany, which was manifest in philosophical reflection, medical treatise, scientific experimentation, theoretical physics, aesthetic theory, and literary practice esp. 1740-1920. The history of vitalism is considered in the context of contemporary discourses on radical reality (or deep naturalism). We ask how animate matter and cognition arise and are maintained through agent-environment dynamics (Whitehead) or performance (Pickering). This book adopts a nonrepresentational approach to studying perception, action, and cognition, which Anthony Chemero designated radical embodied cognitive science. From early physiology to psychoanalysis, from the microbiome to memetics, appreciation of body and mind as symbiotically interconnected with external reality has steadily increased. Leading critics explore here resonances of body, mind, and environment in medical history (Reil, Hahnemann, Hirschfeld), science (Haller, Goethe, Ritter, Darwin, L. Büchner), musical aesthetics (E.T.A. Hoffmann, Wagner), folklore (Grimm), intersex autobiography (Baer), and stories of crime and aberration (Nordau, Döblin). Science and literature both prove to be continually emergent cultures in the quest for understanding and identity. This book will appeal to intertextual readers curious to know how we come to be who we are and, ultimately, how the Anthropocene came to be.

Contents:

Preliminary Material / John A. McCarthy , Stephanie M. Hilger , Heather I. Sullivan and Nicholas Saul

Introduction: Life Matters / John A. McCarthy

Pneuma – Sexuality – Sex Difference: From Arabic to European Philosophy and Medical Practice / Jennifer Wynne Hellwarth

Ordnung des Lebendigen. Naturgeschichtliche Malereien im Kabinett der Franckeschen Stiftungen zu Halle / Ingo Uhlig

Haller, Unzer, and Science as Process / Brian I. McInnis

Lebenskraft, the Body and Will Power: The Life Force in German Musical Aesthetics / James Kennaway

Ritter’s Musical Blood Flow Through Hoffmann’s Kreisler / Alexis B. Smith

Romantic Vitalism and Homeopathy’s Law of Minimum / Alice A. Kuzniar

Folklore and Physiology: The Vitality of Blood in the Works of the Brothers Grimm / Ann C. Schmiesing

Fitness, Nerves, the Degenerate Body and Identity: Radical Reality and Modernity in Max Nordau’s Aesthetics and Fiction / Nicholas Saul

No Body? Radical Gender in Memoirs of a Man’s Maiden Years (1907) / Stephanie M. Hilger

Naturphilosophie and Murder: The Limits of Scientific Explanation in Döblin’s Die beiden Freundinnen / Cate I. Reilly

Agency in the Anthropocene: Goethe, Radical Reality, and the New Materialisms / Heather I. Sullivan

Lebenskraft, Radical Reality, and Occidental Medicine: How Science is Leading us back to a Holistic View” / Monica Ledoux

Epiloque: Lebenskraft Legacies / John A. McCarthy

Select Bibliography / John A. McCarthy , Stephanie M. Hilger , Heather I. Sullivan and Nicholas Saul

Biographical Notes on the Contributors / John A. McCarthy , Stephanie M. Hilger , Heather I. Sullivan and Nicholas Saul.

Notes:

International conference proceedings.

Includes bibliographical references.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

90-04-30903-9

OCLC:

940475537

Publisher Number:

10.1163/9789004309036 DOI