Intoxicated ways of knowing the untold story of intoxicants and the biological subject in nineteenth-century Germany Matthew Perkins-McVe

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Perkins-McVey, Matthew, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Thought and thinking.

Drinking of alcoholic beverages--Germany--Psychological aspects.

Drinking of alcoholic beverages.

Philosophy, German.

Thinking.

thinking.

Drinking of alcoholic beverages--Psychological aspects.

Germany.

Medical Subjects:

Thinking.

Physical Description:

1 online resource

Place of Publication:

Chicago The University of Chicago Press 2026

Summary:

"Argues that intoxication was fundamental to German physiological, psychological, and psychiatric research during the nineteenth century. Intoxicating substances can be found lurking in every corner of modern life, and Matthew Perkins-McVey’s pathbreaking book offers the untold story of how they were implicated in shifting perceptions of embodiment found in the emerging sciences of the body and mind in late-nineteenth-century Germany. Their use in this experimental context gave rise to a dynamic conception of the subject within the scientific, psychological, philosophical, and sociological milieu of the era. The history of the modern biological subject, Perkins-McVey argues, turns on “intoxicated ways of knowing.” Intoxicated Ways of Knowing identifies the state of intoxication as a tacit form of thinking and knowing with the body. Intoxicants force us to feel, intervening directly in our perceptional awareness, and, Perkins-McVey contends, they bring latent conceptual associations into the foreground of conscious thought, engendering new ways of knowing the world. The book unfurls how intoxicants affected nineteenth-century German science and how, ultimately, the connection between mental life and intoxication is taken up in the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Weber, and Sigmund Freud, bringing the biological subject out of the lab and into the worlds of philosophy, psychoanalysis, sociology, and politics"-- De Gruyter Brill

Contents:

Convergences

Pharmacy bodies

Brown, Kant, and the crisis in medicine

Brunonian naturphilosophie and intoxicated knowing

A (brief) historical ontology of an alkaloid

Great expectations : the Humboldts, Johannes Müller, and the rise of neomechanism

The “young” neomechanists and the problem of the brain

A tale of two cities : Berlin, Leipzig, and scientific psychology

A postalkaloidal “golden age” of intoxication

The life and times of Emil Kraepelin : drugs, bodies, and minds

Kraepelin’s nosology and an intoxicated “Physiologie der Seele”

Drunken songs of tomorrow : Nietzsche, Freud, Weber, and intoxication

A horizontal fall

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index

Online resource; title from PDF title page (De Gruyter Brill, viewed January 21, 2026)

Other Format:

Print version Perkins-McVey, Matthew Intoxicated ways of knowing

ISBN:

9780226846125

0226846121

OCLC:

1569645583

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license