180034 VO-L The lodestone between medium and technology (2024S)

Enhance historical and factual knowledge about and comprehension of problems in the philosophy of media and technology.
Exercise capacities of reading, understanding and working with primary philosophical texts.
Thereby develop individual capacities for independent research, investigation, and appropriate presentation.
Enhance understanding of intertwining between philosophy, technology media science.
Intoduction to conceptualisations of Magnetic Phenomena in the History of European Philosophy, thereby broadening the scope of applied metaphysics and its claim that scientific objects can be simultaneously real and historical, and how such objects are constructed in various discourses and practices that become related to each other in these communicative systems (Daston 2000, 3).

Today, most people would perceive of magnets as “pretty common” everyday objects: those little pieces of iron that serve fixtures for our gadgets on fridges. We are aware that they a positive and a negative pole, one that attracts and one that respells other magnets, that a magnet will decrease in power when exposed to heat but that keeping sitting it on the iron wall. And people will remember a vague connection to electricity, and the sailor’s compass and its production. Yet, it will be more difficult to to establish how long it will retain its power … at least for considerable time or so but then for how long? And why exactly should we be careful not to bring these little poeces of magnetized iron close to our computers? Magnets are mysterious Objects, and indeed, from Plato, well into the 19th century, the properties lodestone were a challenge for European philosophers (Anneliese Ego, Farrah). Actually, the theories and practices surrounding magnetic phenomena evolve hand in hand with new world models, medical ideas, psychology of imagination and passions, corpuscular theories, and an experimental practice that was not yet confined to the space of laboratories, in rhetoric, in courtly display (Biagioli) emerging notions of subjectivity and the limits of reason, a defense of free will, the rise of absolutism and Reason of State. To take the valued concerns of many prominent theories of the philosophy of science we can say that magnetism, served as a pervasive stand-in for many of the pressing issues of the day: action at a distance, mechanics, psychology, demonology and the theological debate on free will, politics and, natural magic, panpychism, cosmology, geography, navigation, astronomy, medicine, psychology, materialism. The topic is thus is a highly rewarding object for the study of early modern concepts of instrumentality and an occasion to historicize the very concept of instrumentality. For the lodestone was a material object, all right, but is also, a tool for thought and for the imagination, then still a faculty of the human soul with amazing physical powers to shape minds and bodies (Wolfe).
We may thus perceive magnetic phenomena as part of a process of world- making (Spiller), a imaginative process which is of course also intertwined with the vast field cartography and the concomitant mapping (and dividing) of the world. The highly differentiated, often conflicting perceptions of magnetic phenomena that evolved out of these early modern debates set the stage for the centuries to come.

Method

The VO-L will be held in English, accompanied by reading material from selected relevant primary sources and secondary literature at the student’s disposal in the library.
General introductions to the historical and intellectual backgrounds of the texts under consideration will go along with close readings of selected passages from these texts.