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* (1749–1832) believed that in 1784 he demonstrated the presence of the intermaxillary (premaxillary) 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.

This paper demonstrates the importance of the reception and development of Goethe’s metamorphosis of plants as a methodological and philosophical framework in the history of botanical theories. It proposes a focus on the textbooks written by the German botanist Ludwig Reichenbach and his first attempt to use Goethe’s idea of metamorphosis of plants as fundamental to his natural system of plants published under the title ‘Botany for Women’, in German Botanik für Damen. In this book, Reichenbach paid particular attention to (...) Goethe’s sensitive views on the essence of nature; he regarded Goethe’s idea of metamorphosis in the plant kingdom as an ideal model to interpret connections of natural phenomena, in particular as a conceptual frame for a natural system. Furthermore, he aimed to develop the philosophical statement of the metamorphosis, in which he called for nature-philosophical conceptions in order to materialize his representation of plant “affinities,” and of a kind of “ontogeny” of the whole plant kingdom. This paper demonstrates that, between speculative views and empirical attempts, the extent to which Reichenbach actually belonged to a new “school” of thought, which left its mark on the history and philosophy of botany. (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)

El artículo reactualiza y defiende la potencialidad filosófica de La metamorfosis de las plantas, de Johann Wolfgang Goethe. A partir de la reflexión sobre sus claves conceptuales se desplegarán, a continuación, otros momentos de talante epistemológico relativos a su reflexión sobre la naturaleza, entre otros: la morfología como teoría de la forma, su comprensión de la ciencia como experiencia viva de los fenómenos y su reivindicación de la metamorfosis del científico.

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)