Northwestern Events Calendar

May
2
2016

SHC Klopsteg Lecture: HANS-JÖRG RHEINBERGER

When: Monday, May 2, 2016
4:00 PM - 5:30 PM CT

Where: University Hall, Hagstrum Room, UH 201, 1897 Sheridan Road, Evanston, IL 60208 map it

Audience: Faculty/Staff - Student - Public - Post Docs/Docs - Graduate Students

Cost: OPEN FREE

Contact: Natasha O Dennison   (847) 491-3525

Group: Science in Human Culture Program

Category: Academic

Description:

HANS-JÖRG RHEINBERGER: Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin
Distinguished Visiting Max Kade Professor of German, Northwestern University

"Nature and Culture in the Mirror of Knowledge"

Description: According to the „two cultures“ thesis, the natural sciences and the humanities have, in the course of the 20th century, grown apart into fields of knowledge that do not understand each other anymore. In this lecture, I try to destabilize the contours of this black-and-white thinking and present the history of disciplines as ever-changing – and dramatically so - formations. Contrasting respective positions of Ernst Cassirer, Karl Mannheim, Gaston Bachelard and Pierre Bourdieu, I will discuss concepts of nature and culture on the one hand, and formations of knowledge beyond disciplines on the other.

The gaze beyond – or better, below – the disciplines can be understood as a reaction to the fact that the disciplinary dichotomy between nature and spirit has started to engage in a fundamental transformation throughout the 20th century. The plea from the point of view of a historian of science, instead of looking backwards, aims at promoting a new culture of mutual „call-out-and-in” to deal with an epistemic universe henceforth no longer comprehensible in a dual but in an irreducibly plural mode.

Bio: Born on 12th January, 1946, in Grabs (Switzerland). Study of philosophy and biology in Tübingen and Berlin, M.A. Philosophy (1973), degree in biology (1979) and doctorate as Dr. rer. nat. Free Univ. Berlin (1982), habilitation in molecular biology Free Univ. Berlin (1987), university lecturer Lübeck Univ. (1990), Associate Professor Salzburg Univ. (1994), Scientific Member (since 1996) and Director (since 1997) at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. "Honorarprofessor" (part-time prof.) TU Berlin for the history of science and technology (since 1998). Since 1998, member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, since 2002 member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, honorary doctorate of the ETH Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich in 2002, recipient of the Cogito Prize (2006).

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