Volume 23, Issue 1

The essay examines the occurrence of rhyming mnemonic devices and doctrinal poems in Early Modern German mathematical textbooks. These works were dedicated to the teaching of basic mathematical knowledge for prospective merchants. The article presents an exemplary selection of mnemonic rhymes and doctrinal poems and discusses their function for the teaching of mathematics. The author emphasizes that rhymed passages can occur in almost all areas (algebra, geometry, etc.) of those textbooks. Mnemonic rhymes and doctrinal poems are used in the works primarily to convey the content in a more memorable fashion and to deformalize the presentation of content. The latter is especially true for rhyming in the field of entertainment mathematics, which is also often a feature of the textbooks. However, by using practically oriented language in instruction, the artistic potential of the rhymes is significantly reduced.

The two treatises of 1655, entitled Prae-Adamitae and Systema theologicum ex Praeadamitarum hypothesi, are among the principal works of the French Huguenot author Isaac La Peyrere (1596-1676). Peyrere ‘s theses have occupied a key position within the heretical branch of 17th-century Biblical Criticism: God must have created a human race before Adam, the Bible does not tell the history of mankind but of the elect people of Israel only, and the books of the Pentateuch were certainly not written, if at all, by Moses alone. The present contribution offers an outline of the recent La Peyrere Edition of 2019 and considers a few questions for further study. (1) How close are the Preadamites to early modern utopian literature? (2) What are we to make of Adriaan Beverland’s reference to the Praeadamitae in his infamous book on the Peccatum originale of 1678? (3) Taking up Isaac Popkin’s (1987) interesting suggestion, should we not as well consider a “pre-Eveite theory” alongside La Peyrere’s Preadamite hypothesis? This article concludes by addressing (4) another special desideratum: the early reception of La Peyrere and its continuing effects after the first critical responses as early as 1655/56.

Fontenelle’s dual role as a representative of the Modernes as well as the perpetual secretary of the French Academy of Sciences explains his hesitation in making any public statements about politics. Nevertheless, this article identifies within his best-known Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds a liberal interpretation of the heavens that is supported by the metaphorical transfer between political semantics and the field of cosmology. The idea of this liberality flourishes in the gallant dialogue between two protagonists (the marquise and the philosopher), unfolds within the context of an opening, expert scientific discourse, and is reflected through the physical description of a commerce among celestial vortices. Thus, different aspects of the political within the Conversations are examined - starting from the self-understanding of the individual all the way up to the idea of an egalitarian universe that is characterised by collective interaction.

This article focusses on the discourse surrounding ›projectors‹, autoentrepeneurs, who made plans for innovations of any kind and tried to have potential financiers promote them, from the Baroque to German Romanticism. While the role of projectors in the history of science has been the object of historical study, there is a lack of research regarding the concept’s trajectory and its semantic variation. In the early modern period, the necessity of innovation was emphasized, but also the contingency of project proposals. During the Enlightenment, the tradition of the approval of project-making continued, but projects became detached from projectors. In the late 18th century, the idea of speculation and the fantastic transformed within the area of creativity, due to the primacy of imagination and genius. What happened to the talk about projectors and their ways of self-fashioning after the disappearance of the social figure? What enabled authors to refer to projectors and how was their role historically discussed? Projectors served as a topos of insanity or deception or a sign of unprofessionalism (as shown in examples by Goethe and Schiller). Romanticism carried with it the positive connotations of the project, but also reinterpreted its negative aspects, such as the value of incompletion, insanity and alternative ways of work.

The following analysis of the relationship between Verstehen (understanding) and Übersetzen (translation) continues reflections that Schleiermacher and Humboldt developed in the horizon of their hermeneutic program. In particular, this article examines concepts starting with Fremdheit (otherness), Hemmung (inhibition), Nichtverstehen (non-understanding), and Unübertragbarkeit (non-transferability). These terms mark the core theoretical problem of Schleiermacher’s and Humboldt’s idea of understanding and translation, which already conceptualizes understanding as a form of translation. A moment of inhibition is always already constitutively inscribed in the process of inner-language understanding. It repeatedly interrupts processes of understanding through moments of non-transferability, which triggers transcriptive processing procedures. Nontransferability does not refer to the restriction of a normally undisturbed transfer of meaning (i.e., to a communication defect), but rather to a condition of possibility of understanding meaning itself. Meaning is less built upon languagetranscendent resources than results from genuine linguistic procedures in which non-transferability is constitutively operative.

The starting point for this article is the question of the extent to which knowledge generated and mediated by literature can supplement or modify the professional knowledge of criminal law and practice around 1800. In particular, the article looks at the genres of the criminal case study and crime story, which were popular in this period, as a field of experience for the literary-productive observation of crime and criminal law. It explores the discursive constellations for possible relations between the areas of knowledge produced by the ›professional reason of law‹ and the ›reason of literature‹. These relations are discussed with regard to (1) types of ›medial places‹ in which legal as well as literary texts on criminal matters were published, (2) the aforementioned literary genres and (3) the literary approach of so-called poetic lawyers (›lawyers as writers‹). These perspectives determine the final analyses of texts by August Gottlieb Meisner, Karl Friedrich Muchler and Paul Johann Anselm von Feuerbach.

The 1920s and 1930s are commonly known as the Golden Age of Flight, but they also saw many experiments in rocketry. This article explores the symbolic traces that such early innovations in aerospace engineering left in the sociopolitical thinking of German writer Kurt Hiller (1885-1972). Particular attention is paid to the rhetorical potential of technological discourses in Hiller’s essays and speeches from the 1920s. The article shows how, as a public intellectual, Hiller was able to interlink scientific, religious, biological and political discourses. It furthermore demonstrates that Hiller rhetorically rejected linear scientific thinking in favour of the utopian promise of space travel. This defining opposition in his reasoning hinged on a topical switch from horizontal to vertical orientation, which underpinned his promulgation of a new type of socialist-meritocratic democracy. In this he mirrored the vertical thinking of his times by applying it in a distinctive way to his own sociopolitical writing and thought.

The article contributes to the history of education and the humanities from the 1950s to the 1980s. It focuses primarily on literary and cultural studies (especially German studies), both of which it explores from the perspective of university students. In order to examine the views of students, this article analyzes several hundred so-called .semester reports. from the ›Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes‹, West Germanyʼs largest scholarship-awarding institution for high performing students. In the largely unexplored reports students reflect on their academic development, university courses and interests. Presenting results from an ongoing research project, the article discusses the problems and benefits that derive from analyzing the reports. The reports show the special profile of the humanities with their affinity with everyday discourse and their horizontal arrangement of knowledge, reflect the development of paradigms in the field of literary studies, and, finally, provoke the question to what extent we can speak of a history of the humanities.

What sort of object is a literary text? From a phenomenological point of view - phenomenology considered as both a radical theory of reading and a theory of radical reading - a range of answers arise, many of them tinged with deconstructive momentum. This paper aims at pointing out some basic issues in reading literary texts, offering ten theses on the enduring tasks of phenomenological literary theory.

Tracing the transformations phenomenological thought underwent in the sphere of literary studies after the 1930s, the paper outlines the epistemological potential of this tradition in regards to a proper understanding of the phenomenon ›text‹. Proceeding from reflections on the agonal relation between structuralistic and phenomenological traditions within contemporary literary theory, the article focuses on Husserl’s apprehension of texts as being »objects in procedure« by exploring the impact of this idea on the literary theories of Ingarden, Wellek, and Iser. In light of the - largely forgotten - fact that Karl Bühler’s pioneering Language Theory (1934) is mainly based on phenomenological thinking, the paper finally discusses to what extend Bühler’s idea of verbal expressions figuring as effective events could open a new space for the development of a literary theory of texts within recent debates on the »media of literature«.

Even though it is widely agreed in education theory and psychology that the teacher’s charisma plays an essential role in teaching literature in school, the concept of charisma as a factor of effective teaching is usually applied only in the widest and most abstract sense. In scrutinizing the history of teaching methods, psychology, and literary theory in the second half of the 20th century, this paper identifies the cognitive and emotional aspects of reading literature that are prerequisite to charismatic teaching. Finally, it suggests that these aspects can be explained by drawing on phenomenological literary theory, i.e. that the notion of the teacher’s charisma can be founded in phenomenology.

Despite the express intentions of his phenomenological investigations, the radical significance of Edmund Husserl’s discussions of signs and meaning may reside in their exposure of the ways in which language remains structurally alien to the field of subjectivity and cognition. If this would mean that a phenomenological theory of cognition could not guide the study of literary language, however, fiction may nonetheless turn out to be one of the most important sources for phenomenological »Erkenntnis«, albeit in a different way than Husserl could have meant in his famous affirmation of fiction in phenomenological research: as the exposure of its limits, and as the further explication of a field where, as Jacques Derrida would write, »every present subject can be absent.« This possibility is explored in the present contribution through an analysis of Robert Musil’s Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften.

Dedicated to the interrelation between philosophy and rhetoric, this article focuses on the rhetoric of philosophy, respectively a rhetoric in the service of philosophy. Here, rhetoric is not understood as a mere art of eloquence or sophistry. Rather, the term defines: first, speech and persuasion as a spontaneous, pre-theoretical and communicative ability of humans, second, the regular and systematic use of this ability, and, finally, the technique of persuasion itself. In this article, special attention is paid to the rhetorical means that play a central role in the constitution and assertion of science and theory. In particular, the article investigates the rhetoric of phenomenology as conception and as use of language in the aversion of rhetoric in Edmund Husserl’s Logische Untersuchungen and in Heidegger’s affinity for rhetoric in Sein und Zeit. Initially, it outlines the respective conceptions of language in Husserl and Heidegger and scrutinizes their mutual influences in order to reconstruct the network of transfer, continuation, and repercussion that characterizes the relation between both authors. In a second step, it focuses on Heidegger’s use of language.