Monist Philosophy of Science: Between Worldview and Scientific Meta-Reflection

Ziche, Paul

doi:10.1057/9781137011749_7

Cited by 3 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…One of their main targets of criticism was energetics ( Energetik ) as advocated by Wilhelm Ostwald (1853–1932): an attempt at unifying physics by interpreting all natural phenomena as manifestations of energy. Ostwald set the tone for the debate by claiming that this project drew on the most promising aspects of philosophical Idealism, while avoiding its faults (Ziche 2005, 32). His critics, however, were quick to point out that energetics was nothing but a reincarnation of Hegel's and Schelling's nature philosophy.…”

Section: Old Vices In New Contextsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Icarus flight of speculation: Philosophers' vices as perceived by nineteenth‐century historians and physicists

Hagen

Paul

2023

Metaphilosophy

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Why did nineteenth-century German historians and physicists habitually warn against vices that they believed philosophers in particular embodied: speculation, absence of common sense, and excessive systematizing? Drawing on a rich array of sources, this article interprets this vice-charging as a rhetorical practice aimed at delineating empirical research from Naturphilosophie and Geschichtsphilosophie as practiced in the heyday of German Idealism. The strawman of "the philosopher" as invoked by historians and physicists served as a negative model for strongly empiricist scholars committed to virtues like precision, thoroughness, and conscientiousness. In their historical narratives, historians and physicists consistently depicted philosophy either as a relic from the past or as a phase that they had virtuously left behind. This boundary work was central to the self-positioning of both history and physics, which makes clear that the persona of the philosopher mattered not only to philosophers but also to scholars in adjacent disciplines.

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Section: Old Vices In New Contextsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Icarus flight of speculation: Philosophers' vices as perceived by nineteenth‐century historians and physicists

Hagen

Paul

2023

Metaphilosophy

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“…Monism was a philosophical worldview based in science and derived from the German Darwinist Ernst Haeckel, Semon's major professor (Gliboff, 2012;Richards, 2008). That worldview proposed a unified materialist and evolutionary vision of science, mind, and morality that flourished before World War I and took many forms (Weir, 2012;Ziche, 2012). Most of them interpreted mind and brain as a single entity.…”

Section: Monakow's Teleological Theory Of Instinctmentioning

confidence: 99%

Psychoneurosis beyond Oedipus: neurophysiology, drive conflict, and the resolution of emotional trauma

Logan

2017

Palgrave Commun

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The concept of plasticity infused regenerative approaches to brain science in Switzerland in the mid-twentieth century, shaping a holistic tradition prominent among Zurich's psychiatrists and neurologists. From 1910 to about 1950, they sought to objectify the dynamic unconscious using a psychobiological approach to mental pathology pioneered by the neuroanatomists August Forel and Constantin von Monakow. Little scholarship, however, has explored this tradition. Both Forel and Monakow influenced Rudolf Brun, a Zurich neurologist and ant expert, who championed parallels between biological conflicts measured in social insects and Sigmund Freud's drive energetics. Brun's concept of drive conflict integrated Richard Semon's theory of plastic heredity as "species memory" with a revision of Monakow to explain mental pathology in the brain. Through them, he proposed the neuropathology underlying Freud's "genuine" psychoneuroses: those caused by unconscious memories of traumatic experience. This paper uses primary historical sources from the Swiss scientific literature to demonstrate that (1) Brun combined Semon's plastic heredity, Cannon's physiology and Pavlov's conditional reflex to objectify Freud's dynamic unconscious; and (2) though he rejected Monakow's teleology, Brun's holistic mind-body approach owed much to Monakow's theory of emotions and pathology manifest in the brain. Brun elaborated Monakow's view that psychopathology occurs as unconscious drive conflicts produce neurotoxicity, enabling excess hormones to disrupt the brain's protective filtering system. Brun's ant experiments confirmed evolutionary "laws" governing drive conflict and framed the neuro-energetics underlying the resolution of repressed emotional trauma. Tests pitted conflicts between social drives and those serving self-interest. Through them, Brun extended moral conflict beyond the Oedipal domain of psychoanalysis to encompass conflicts in a biological hierarchy of drives. This drive-based account of conscience explored neural pathways reaching back from the cortex to the body, so enabling traumatic memories to generate psychoneuroses. Plasticity could then justify the use of psychotherapy to reverse these pathogenic connections. Brun's example demonstrates both the significance of Semon's theory of heredity for objective accounts of the unconscious mind in Central Europe and the hidden legacy of Monakow's neuroendocrine holism. Brun combined that legacy with objective evidence and Zurich's emphasis on plasticity to endorse-somewhat paradoxically-the reversal of psychoneuroses in the brain.

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Weltanschauung

Ziche¹

2021

Simmel-Handbuch

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Monist Philosophy of Science: Between Worldview and Scientific Meta-Reflection

Cited by 3 publications

References 1 publication

The Icarus flight of speculation: Philosophers' vices as perceived by nineteenth‐century historians and physicists

The Icarus flight of speculation: Philosophers' vices as perceived by nineteenth‐century historians and physicists

Psychoneurosis beyond Oedipus: neurophysiology, drive conflict, and the resolution of emotional trauma

Weltanschauung

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