Joscelyn Godwin: Athanasius Kircher: A Renaissance Man and the Quest for Lost Knowledge (1979)

Athanasius Kircher (1602-80) stands out as one of the last all-encompassing minds, living in the age of Descartes and Newton, but expounding his knowledge in the light of a unified, spiritual world-view. For this true Renaissance man, the whole cosmos was a glorious theophany waiting to be explored.

Kircher was a Jesuit and an archeologist, a phenomenal linguist and an avid collector of scientific instruments and geographical exploration. He probed the secrets of the subterranean world, deciphered archaic languages, experimented with alchemy and music-therapy, optics and magnetism.

Egyptian mystery wisdom, Greek, Cabbalistic and Christian philosophy met on common ground in Kircher’s work; his sumptuous, encyclopaedic volumes were revered throughout Europe. His gigantic oeuvre is approached here through striking engravings – most of them reprinted for the first time – together with annotations and an introduction to Kircher’s life and work.

Publisher Thames & Hudson, 1979
Art and Imagination series
ISBN 0500810222, 9780500810224
96 pages

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Michel Meulders: Helmholtz: From Enlightenment to Neuroscience (2001/2010)

“Although Hermann von Helmholtz was one of most remarkable figures of nineteenth-century science, he is little known outside his native Germany. Helmholtz (1821-1894) made significant contributions to the study of vision and perception and was also influential in the painting, music, and literature of the time; one of his major works analyzed tone in music. This book, the first in English to describe Helmholtz’s life and work in detail, describes his scientific studies, analyzes them in the context of the science and philosophy of the period—in particular the German Naturphilosophie—and gauges his influence on today’s neuroscience.

Helmholtz, trained by Johannes Müller, one of the best physiologists of his time, used a resolutely materialistic and empirical scientific method in his research. This puts him in the tradition of Kant and the English empirical philosophers and directly opposed to the idealists and naturalists who interpreted nature based on metaphysical presuppositions. Helmholtz’s research on color vision put him at odds with Goethe’s more romantic theorizing on the subject; but at the end of his life, Helmholtz honored Goethe’s contributions, acknowledging that artistic intuition could reveal truths about the human mind that are inaccessible to science.

Helmholtz’s work, eclipsed at the beginning of the twentieth century by new ideas in neurophysiology, has recently been rediscovered. We can now recognize in Helmholtz’s methods–which were based on his belief in the interconnectedness of physiology and psychology–the origins of neuroscience.”

Originally published as Helmholtz: Des lumières aux neurosciences, Odile Jacob, Paris, 2001

Translated and edited by Laurence Garey
Publisher MIT Press, 2010
ISBN 0262014483, 9780262014489
235 pages

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Julia Kursell (ed.): Sounds of Science – Schall im Labor, 1800–1930 (2008) [English, German]

The following collection of papers documents the workshop Sounds of Science – Schall im Labor, 1800 to 1930, carried out at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, in October 2006.

The workshop asked about the role sound plays in the configurations among science, technology and the arts, focusing on the years between 1800 and 1930. The chronological point of departure was the appearance of a registration technique: in 1802 Ernst Florens Friedrich Chladni published his book on acoustics where he extensively described the Klangfiguren – his visualizations of the movements of a vibrating, sounding body. This time span was also characterized by the systematization of research into hearing, which Hermann von Helmholtz greatly promoted through his book On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music, which first appeared in 1863. Helmholtz’s resonance theory of hearing described in this book was not replaced by a new explanation for the process of hearing until the end of the 1920s, which gives another temporal delineation for the workshop. Furthermore, between 1800 and 1930 a wealth of technical innovation in the realm of acoustical media occurred: in addition to a series of visualization techniques for sound, the phonograph and gramophone, microphone and loudspeaker, telephone and radio were invented. As well, the music of European tonal composition underwent a radical change during this time that led to a collapse of the tonal system and provoked the demand for music composed of sounds and noises, rather than tones.

Conference participants were invited to discuss the role of sounds in the laboratory from different angles, in three parts. The “Materiality of Sound” was oriented towards research into material cultures and cultural techniques in experimentation. “Registration, Transmission, Transformation” put questions of medial historiography into the foreground, while “Experimental Aesthetics” thematized aesthetic implications.

With papers by Bernhard Siegert, Peter Szendy, Julia Kursell, Florian Hoelscher, Florian Dombois, Henning Schmidgen, Jonathan Sterne, Wolfgang Hagen, Douglas Kahn, Daniel Gethmann, Elena Ungeheuer, and Myles W. Jackson.

Publisher Max-Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, 2008
MPG Preprint 346
Open Access
134 pages

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