Bauchner, Joshua (Author)
Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences
Volume: 51
Issue: 1
Pages: 1-47
The Leipzig physicist Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801–88) is best known for his introduction of psychophysics, an exact, empirical science of the relations between mind and body and a crucial part of nineteenth-century sensory physiology and experimental psychology. Based on an extensive and close reading of Fechner’s diaries, this article considers psychophysics from the vantage of his everyday life, specifically the experience of taking a walk. This experience was not mere fodder for his scientific practice, as backdrop, object, or tool. Rather, on foot, Fechner pursued an investigation of the mind-body parallel to his natural-scientific one; in each domain, he strove to render the mind-body graspable, each in its own idiom, here everyday and there scientific. I give an account of Fechner’s walks as experiences that he both undertook and underwent, that shaped and were shaped by the surrounding everyday cacophony, and that carried a number of competing meanings for Fechner himself; the attendant analysis draws on his major scientific work, Elemente der Psychophysik (1860; Elements of Psychophysics), as the thick context that renders the walks legible as an everyday investigation. What results are three modes of walking—physiopsychical, interpersonal, and universal—each engaging the mind-body at a different level, as also engaged separately in Elemente’s three major sections, outer psychophysics, inner psychophysics, and general psychophysics beyond the human. This analysis ultimately leads to a new view of Fechner’s belief in a God who was “omnipresent and conscious in nature” and whom Fechner encountered daily on his walks in the budding of new blooms and rustling of the wind. More broadly, I aim to bring the analysis of everyday experiences as experiences into the historiography of science.
...MoreSimilar Citations
Article
Michele Vagnetti;
(2024)
Rudolph Hermann Lotze's philosophically informed psychology
Book
David J. Murray;
Stephen W. Link;
(2020)
The Creation of Scientific Psychology
Article
Masin, Sergio Cesare;
Zudini, Verena;
Antonelli, Mauro;
(2009)
Early Alternative Derivations of Fechner's Law
Article
Robinson, David K.;
(2010)
Gustav Fechner: 150 Years of Elemente der Psychophysik
Article
Meischner-Metge, Anneros;
(2010)
Gustav Theodor Fechner: Life and Work in the Mirror of His Diary
Article
Robinson, David K.;
(2010)
Fechner's “Inner Psychophysics”
Article
Wegener, Mai;
(2009)
Der psychophysische Parallelismus. Zu einer Diskursfigur im Feld der wissenschaftlichen Umbrüche des ausgehenden 19. Jahrhunderts
Article
Zudini, Verena;
(2011)
The Euclidean Model of Measurement in Fechner's Psychophysics
Thesis
Hui, Alexandra;
(2008)
Hearing Sound as Music: Psychophysical Studies of Sound Sensation and the Music Culture of Germany, 1860--1910
Book
Nicholls, Angus;
Liebscher, Martin;
(2010)
Thinking the Unconscious: Nineteenth-Century German Thought
Article
Douglas Hedley;
(2017)
Gods and Giants: Cudworth’s Platonic Metaphysics and His Ancient Theology
Chapter
Danielle Coriale;
(2017)
Reading through Deafness: Francis Galton and the Strange Science of Psychophysics
Article
Lennig, Petra;
(1994)
Die Entwicklung des Grundkonzeptes der Psychophysik durch Gustav Theodor Fechner: Eine spezielle Lösungsvariante des philosophisch tradierten Leib-Seele-Problems?
Article
Wragge-Morley, Alexander;
(2009)
A Strange and Surprising Debate: Mountains, Original Sin and “Science” in Seventeenth-Century England
Book
Broadie, Sarah;
(2012)
Nature and Divinity in Plato's Timaeus
Thesis
Frunzeanu, Eduard;
(2007)
Les configurations de la natura dans le “Speculum maius” de Vincent de Beauvais
Article
Vesa Hirvonen;
(2018)
Mental disorders in commentaries by the late medieval theologians Richard of Middleton, John Duns Scotus, William Ockham and Gabriel Biel on Peter Lombard’s Sentences
Book
Carmela Morabito;
(2020)
Il motore della mente. Il movimento nella storia delle scienze cognitive
Article
Carluccio, Dana;
(2013)
The Cognitive Fictions and Functions of Gender in Evolutionary Psychology and Poststructuralist Theory
Article
Sobol, Valeria;
(2006)
Nerves, Brain, or Heart? The Physiology of Emotions and the Mind-Body Problem in Russian Sentimentalism
Be the first to comment!