Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is most famous for his work on color theory, but he was also an accomplished all-round scientist, studying and writing on anatomy, geology, botany, zoology and meteorology. This book draws together, in Goethe's own words, his key ideas on nature, science and scientific method. Goethe believed that we should study our world and nature as people at home in it, rather than removedly, as if we were aliens from another planet. He adopted a qualitative (...) approach to science at odds with Newton's quantitative methods that were so popular in his day. His is a sensitive science which does not ignore our relationship to nature. The extracts in this book are fascinating and essential reading for anyone who feels that we've lost our spiritual connection to nature. (shrink)

Goethe’s religiosity appears at the same time profoundly sincere yetescaping confessional labels. It has been claimed that Goethe was Christian,theist, mason, and even a pagan. Our work aims at studying Goethe’sreligiosity throughout his life, and in particular in his relationship with Islām.Of all religions Goethe studied and interacted with, Islām is remarkably absentfrom literary critic, yet he elaborated it throughout his life. We will proposea periodisation which divides his relationship with Islām into four stages, inwhich specific religious themes echo in (...) his letters and works, most of whichhave not been pointed out before, such as in the Faust. Finally, we will discussour findings in the context of religious studies scholarship, and approach theissue of what can Goethe suggest for the meaning of a European Islām today. (shrink)

Johann Wolfgang Goethe* believed that in 1784 he demonstrated the presence of the intermaxillary bone in man, and that after a certain amount of opposition professional anatomists accepted his findings. This paper tries to show what the anatomical facts are, what it was that Goethe discovered, how his beliefs about his contribution and influence arose, and how his discovery is related to his general scientific aims and methods.

Fink explores how Goethe's scientific activities contributed to the growing literature in the history and philosophy of science.

"Die Gedanken, die ich in diesem Buche mitteile, sollen die Grundstimmung festhalten, die ich in der Weltanschauung Goethes beobachtet habe. Im Lauf vieler Jahre habe ich immer wieder und wieder das Bild dieser Weltanschauung betrachtet. Besonderen Reiz hatte es fur mich, nach den Offenbarungen zu sehen, welche die Natur uber ihr Wesen und ihre Gesetze den feinen Sinnes- und Geistesorganen Goethes gemacht hat. Ich lernte begreifen, warum Goethe diese Offenbarungen als so hohes Gluck empfand, dass er sie zuweilen (...) hoher schatzte als seine Dichtungsgabe. Die Eindrucke, welche Goethe von den Erscheinungen der Natur empfangen hat, muss man kennen, wenn man den vollen Gehalt seiner Dichtungen verstehen will. Die Geheimnisse, die er dem Wesen und Werden der Schopfung abgelauscht hat, leben in seinen kunstlerischen Erzeugnissen und werden nur demjenigen offenbar, der hinhorcht auf die Mitteilungen, die der Dichter uber die Natur macht. Niemand kann in die Tiefen der Goetheschen Kunst hinuntertauchen, dem Goethes Naturbeobachtungen unbekannt sind." [...] Rudolf Steiner war ein osterreichischer Esoteriker und Philosoph. Auf Grundlage seiner Lehre entstand unter anderem die Waldorfpadagogik. Der Verlag der Wissenschaften verlegt historische Literatur bekannter und unbekannter wissenschaftlicher Autoren. Dem interessierten Leser werden so teilweise langst nicht mehr verlegte Werke wieder zugangig gemacht. Das vorliegende Buch ist ein unveranderter Nachdruck der historischen Originalausgabe aus dem Jahr 1897.". (shrink)

Frankfurt/M., Berlin, Bern, Bruxelles, New York, Oxford, Wien. Herausgegeben von Wilhelm Lutterfelds, Richard Raatzsch und Andreas Roser. The works of both Goethe and Wittgenstein are a permanent challenge. Goethe's lasting effectiveness is to be found in the alternative nature of his world-view, which may be characterized as a morphological access to the manifold of phenomena. Lasting in a similar way to the effect of Goethe, one could certainly say today that Wittgenstein's effect has lasted. This is no coincidence. The fact (...) that late Wittgenstein goes together with Goethe in fundamental respects, or even follows him, cannot be overseen. Wittgenstein's lasting legacy has, to a large extent, the same source as that of Goethe's. - This relation is the subject of this book. Contents: Fritz Breithaupt/Richard Raatzsch: Introduction - James C. Klagge: The Puzzle of Goethe's Influence on Wittgenstein - Matthias Kross: Engineering Phenomena: Wittgenstein and Goethe on Scientific Method - Nikos Psarros: "Water is one individual thing - it never changes." Quoting Faraday in the Philosophical Investigations: A Riddle with a Goethean Solution? - Joachim Schulte: Goethe and Wittgenstein on Morphology - Fritz Breithaupt: Non-Referentiality: A Common Strategy in Goethe's Urphanomen and Wittgenstein's Language-Game - Alfred Nordmann: "I have changed his way of seeing" -Goethe, Lichtenberg, and Wittgenstein - Garry Hagberg: The Mind shown. Wittgenstein, Goethe and the Question of Person-Perception - Richard Eldridge: Romantic Subjectivity in Goethe and Wittgenstein - Richard Raatzsch: Goethe's Wahlverwandtschaften - The Ethical Investigations of Late Wittgenstein? (shrink)

The title of this volume—published in the series “Lisbon Philosophical Studies” devoted to “uses of language in interdisciplinary fields”—is potentially misleading, because its subject is, rather than linguistic morphology, the Morphologie associated with the German poet, playwright, and thinker, Johann Wolfgang Goethe. For Goethe, morphology is a science dedicated to the observation and description of everything that “is handled by chance and occasionally in other [sciences]”, and hence, it is intended to serve as a complement to any number (...) of disciplines: philosophy, art history, mathematics, cognitive science, linguistics, history, demography, computer science, and architecture . All these disciplines are, in one way or another, represented in this collection of papers, which arises from a project carried out at the IFL at the New University of Lisbon, the EHESS (School for Advanc .. (shrink)

The entry on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) for the Cambridge Spinoza Lexicon, edited by Karolina Hübner and Justin Steinberg. This is the second (August 2022) draft; please do not quote, but comments are very welcome.

This book explains the background and rationale of the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's notorious attack on Isaac Newton's classic theory of white light and colors. Though the merits of Goethe's color science, as advanced in his massive Zur Farbenlehre, have often been acknowledged, it has been almost unanimously proclaimed invalid as physics. How could Goethe have been so mistaken? In his book, Dennis Sepper shows that the condemnation of Goethe's attacks on Newton has been based on (...) erroneous assumptions about the history of Newton's theory and the methods and goals of Goethe's color science. By illuminating the historical background and the experimental, methodological, and philosophical aspects of Goethe's work, the author shows that his color theory is in an important sense genuinely physical and that, as simultaneously poet, scientist, historian, and philosopher, Goethe managed to anticipate important twentieth-century research not only in the history and philosophy of science, but even in color science itself. (shrink)

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's approach to natural scientific research has unmistakable parallels to phenomenology. These parallels are clear enough to allow one to say confidently that Goethe's delicate empiricism is indeed a phenomenology of nature. This paper examines how Goethe's criticisms of Newton anticipated Husserl's announcement of the crisis of the modern sciences, and it describes how Goethe, at a critical juncture in cultural history, addressed this emerging crisis through a scientific method that is virtually identical to the (...) method of contemporary empirical-phenomenological research in the human sciences. Goethe's practice of science shares with phenomenology a participatory, morally-responsive, and holistic approach to the description of dynamic life-world phenomena. Delicate empiricism has its own version of the phenomenological epoché, and, like Husserl's technique of imaginative variation, it strives to disclose the essential or archetypal structure of the phenomenon through the endowment of human imagination. However, a close reading of Goethe suggests that the tendency amongst some scholars to distinguish phenomenology as human science from the natural sciences is actually a costly error which unwittingly falls prey to implicit Cartesian assumptions. Goethe, however, manages to avoid these problems by performing from the first a phenomenology of nature's sensibility. (shrink)