ACTA UNIVERSITATIS UPSALIENSIS Uppsala Studies in History of Ideas 48
ACTA UNIVERSITATIS UPSALIENSIS Uppsala Studies in History of Ideas 48 ANDREAS RYDBERG Inner Experience An Analysis of Scientific Experience in Early Modern Germany Dissertation presented at Uppsala University to be publicly examined in Geijersalen (Eng6-1023), Engelska Parken, Humanistiskt centrum, Thunbergsvägen 3P, Uppsala, Friday, 9 June 2017 at 10:00 for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. The examination will be conducted in Swedish. Faculty examiner: Kristiina Savin (Lunds universitet, Institutionen för kulturvetenskaper). Abstract Rydberg, A. 2017. Inner Experience. An Analysis of Scientific Experience in Early Modern Germany. Uppsala Studies in History of Ideas 48. 245 pp. Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis. ISBN 978-91-554-9926-6. In the last decades a number of studies have shed light on early modern scientific experience. While some of these studies have focused on how new facts were forced out of nature in so-called experimental situations, others have charted long-term transformations. In this dissertation I explore a rather different facet of scientific experience by focusing on the case of the Prussian university town Halle in the period from the late seventeenth till the mid-eighteenth century. At this site philosophers, theologians and physicians were preoccupied with categories such as inner senses , inner experience, living experience, psychological experiments and psychometrics. In the study I argue that these hitherto almost completely overlooked categories take us away from observations of external things to the internal organisation of experience and to entirely internal objects of experience. Rather than seeing this internal side of scientific experience as mere theory and epistemology, I argue that it was an integral and central part of what has been referred to as the cultura animi tradition, that is, the philosophical and medical tradition of approaching the soul as something in need of cultivation, education, disciplination and cure.
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