Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Rydberg, Andreas

Titel

Self-observational life in eighteenth-century Germany

Ist Teil von

• Intellectual history review, 2024-04, Vol.34 (2), p.343-364

Ort / Verlag

Abingdon: Routledge

Erscheinungsjahr

2024

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Taylor & Francis Journals Auto-Holdings Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• In recent decades historians of science have argued that observation became something of a way of life in the early modern period. This article expands this analysis by shifting focus from observational practices within natural and experimental philosophy to a number of discourses and practices of self-examination and self-observation in eighteenth-century Germany. While the initial aim of these was therapeutic rather than scientific, therapeutic connotations were partly replaced by epistemic virtues and techniques adopted from natural and experimental philosophy toward the end of the century. The article further argues that the subordination of self-observation to scientific modes of procedure reflected the increasingly radical interest in human subjectivity and, by extension, the emergence of a modern civic and individual self.