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Title The early history of embodied cognition 1740-1920 : the Lebenskraft-debate and radical reality in German science, music, and literature / edited by John A. McCarthy, Stephanie M. Hilger, Heather I. Sullivan, Nicholas Saul.

Publication Info. Leiden ; Boston : Brill Rodopi, [2016]

Item Status

Description 1 online resource (357 pages .)
text file
Series Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft ; volume 189
Internationale Forschungen zur allgemeinen und vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft ; 189.
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references.
Summary This 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 The Early History of Embodied Cognition 1740-1920: The Lebenskraft-Debate and Radical Reality in German Science, Music, and Literature; Copyright; Table of Contents; Preface; Establishing Parameters: Lebenskraft and Artifact; 1. Introduction: Life Matters; 2. Pneuma -- Sexuality -- Sex Difference: From Arabic to European Philosophy and Medical Practice; 3. Ordnung des Lebendigen. Naturgeschichtliche Malereien im Kabinett der Franckeschen Stiftungen zu Halle; 4. Haller, Unzer, and Science as Process; Blood, Nerves, Resonance.
5. Lebenskraft, the Body and Will Power: The Life Force in German Musical Aesthetics6. Ritter's Musical Blood Flow Through Hoffmann's Kreisler; 7. Romantic Vitalism and Homeopathy's Law of Minimum; 8. Folklore and Physiology: The Vitality of Blood in the Works of the Brothers Grimm; Fitness and Fitting In; 9. Fitness, Nerves, the Degenerate Body and Identity: Radical Reality and Modernity in Max Nordau's Aesthetics and Fiction; 10. No Body? Radical Gender in Memoirs of a Man's Maiden Years (1907).
11. Naturphilosophie and Murder: The Limits of Scientific Explanation in Döblin's Die beiden FreundinnenThe Lebenskraft-Debate Recast: The Posthuman and Radical Mediation; 12. Agency in the Anthropocene: Goethe, Radical Reality, and the New Materialisms; 13. Lebenskraft, Radical Reality, and Occidental Medicine: How Science is Leading us back to a Holistic View"; Epiloque: Lebenskraft Legacies; Select Bibliography; Biographical Notes on the Contributors.
Local Note eBooks on EBSCOhost EBSCO eBook Subscription Academic Collection - North America
Language In English and German.
Subject Vital force.
Vital force.
Vitalism in literature.
Vitalism in literature.
Science -- Germany -- Philosophy -- History.
Science.
Germany.
Philosophy.
History.
Genre/Form Electronic books.
History.
Added Author McCarthy, John A. (John Aloysius), 1942- editor.
Other Form: Print version: 9789004309029 9004309020 (OCoLC)932068936
ISBN 9789004309036 (electronic book)
9004309039 (electronic book)
9789004309029
9004309020
Standard No. 10.1163/9789004309036