عنوان

The Unknown Future:

TLpq2406958900

انگلیسی

The Unknown Future:

[Thesis]

Kurianowicz, Tomasz

Premonitions Between Prophecy and Pathology, 1750 to 1850

Anriopoulos, Stefan;Simons, Oliver

Columbia University

2020

224

Ph.D.

Columbia University

2020

My dissertation The Unknown Future examines the notion of Ahnung or Ahndung (in English: premonition) in German literature, philosophy, anthropology, and the sciences around 1800. Focusing on the heated debates among philosophers, writers and intellectuals as to whether humans can attain knowledge about the future, I trace the notion of Ahnung as it traverses various discourses. In doing so, I draw on Stephen Greenblatt's idea of a new historicism and expand studies written by Stefan Andriopoulos, Joseph Vogl, Eva Horn, Michael Gamper and other scholars, explicitly referring to and expanding the literary theory concerning "poetologies of knowledge." Specifically I show how after 1750 religious models of prophecy were no longer easily accepted. At the same time, new statistical and mathematical models of prognosis were rising -- even as doubts remained about their ability to fully grasp the progression of time. Within these conflicts between traditional religious models and the new exact sciences, the concept of 'premonition' seemed to offer various thinkers and writers evidence for a prognostic capability of the soul that challenged rational, mathematical and statistical models of probability as the sole means for predicting the future. The hope was that premonitions could provide a supersensory knowledge based on fleeting, opaque glimpses into the progression of time.

Goethe

Herder

Kant

Moritz

Premonitions

Tieck

Anriopoulos, Stefan

Kurianowicz, Tomasz

Simons, Oliver

p

[Thesis]

276903

a

Y