Public Lectures

Summer School lectures open to the interested public:

"Theologie als Bildwissenschaft“ (Iconic Turn in Theology - and by Theology)
Prof. Dr. Philipp Stoellger (Systematic Theology and Philosophy of Religion, Rostock University)
June 16th at 8 pm, Alte Aula

Like the linguistic and the cultural turn, the iconic turn is a challenge for theology. Therefore it is an unavoidable task to answer this challenge. On the one hand, theology has to take part in the actual discourses in iconic theory (like Boehm, Belting, Bredekamp; Nancy, Latour, Didi-Huberman, Marin and many others). On the other hand theology has to look for its own voice in these discourses. This voice may be found (and founded) by the iconic impact in theology´s own traditions. At this point protestant theology raises a problem because its main traditions (mainly in the reformed, partly the Lutheran churches) are iconophobic. The jewish background is actually aniconic. The catholic tradition in contrast is quite iconophil. Is it possible to find a protestant perspective in between aniconic, iconophobic and iconophil attitudes?
One way to find this perspective is its connection to the theological topoi of incarnation and/or of crucifixion. The dominant reason for religious icons and the theological “licence” for iconophils is the incarnation: when God became man he became visible. Therefore visibility is a legitimate medium of religious practices. But the question remains if there are particular protestant reasons for visibility and icons. May the crucifixion bear reasons for iconicity?
A second way to find a critical and constructive perspective could be inspired by some present concepts in iconicity: the visual between visible and invisible (Didi-Huberman), the iconic criticism (Boehm), the hermeneutics of iconoclashes (Latour) and iconicity as medium of the imaginary (Nancy). These references may be evaluated for a theory of iconicity in a protestant perspective.

   
"Das 'Leben' der Bilder - und die Kunst der Bild-Überwindung in Mythos, Robotik und Gentechnologie" ("The ‘Living’ Image – or how to Overcome the Picture - Myths, Robotic and Gene Technology")

PD Dr. Christiane Kruse (Art History, Philipps-University Marburg)  
June 18th at 8 pm, Ernst-von-Hülsen Haus, Biegenstr. 11

The western cultural history of pictures has always been concerned with the question how to overcome the artefact or the picture, i.e. how to invent new technologies imitating or simulating the natural world. The talk refers to what I call the transiconic impulse in ancient and modern art technology beginning with Pygmalion’s sculpture, a work of perfect mimesis. In the age of new technologies, clones or nanotechnology, we now seem to enter a new state of mimesis. Dolly or Polly, the first sheep-clones, has realized an old dream of the human being: the creation of artificial life. Soon it may be possible to create men of our own image. The different phenomenon of the artefact intended as ‘living’ being shows a general aspect of western visual culture depending on Platon’s dichotomic concept of art and nature, death and life, appearance and reality etc. The picture, the work of art, the clone, I will show, live between these dichotomies their own lives – in our imagination.

 
"Man as man's model – Human models in our scientific self-interpretation"
Prof. Dr. Paul Ziche (History of Modern Philosophy, Utrecht University, the Netherlands)
June 23rd at 8 pm, Ernst-von-Hülsen Haus, Biegenstr. 11

Given both man's complexity and our apparently intimate familiarity with his capacities, it seems to be an attractive strategy to model the more complex human achievements through man himself: For Augustine has the soul a head as well as feet, Descartes and Kepler study vision by placing a human-like observer, as it were, inside the head, and more modern presentations of neuroscience often visualize processes in the brain through homunculi. The philosophy of mind, however, has argued forcefully against this type of visualization; modeling man through man seems a blatant case of circular reasoning. It seems, on the other hand, almost impossible to understand the human capacity for self-reflective thinking in other terms than through a self-duplication of man into a subject and an object. The lecture will explore these conflicting attitudes with regard to the self-modelling of man through man, and will discuss the plausibility of this strategy, with a focus on historical and contemporary modelling strategies in the natural sciences.