[SydPhil] Daniela Helbig: Sir Arthur Eddington and Walter Benjamin on scientific and everyday experience".

[Kristie Miller]

Dear all, 

This coming Monday 1.00-2.30 Daniela Helbig will talk to us about:

The camel and the needle's eye: Sir Arthur Eddington and Walter Benjamin on scientific and everyday experience. 

“We can virtually hear Kafka speak!” – This was Walter Benjamin’s reaction, sent in a letter to Gershom Sholem in 1936, to the physicist Sir Arthur Eddington’s description of crossing a doorstep. With swirling molecules and gaping holes between them narratively scaled up to a human-sized order of magnitude, the rather ordinary action of stepping on a wooden plank seemed like an absurdly difficult task. My paper contrasts Eddington’s construction of “everyday experience” out of an opposition to scientifically grounded knowledge with Benjamin’s reading of this construction, and investigates both thinkers’ positions on keeping separate the notions of ‘knowledge’ and ‘experience’ as they had developed them during the first few decades of the 20th century.
Dr. Kristie Miller

As usual we are in the common room in the quad.


University of Sydney 
Senior Research Fellow
School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry and
The Centre for Time
The University of Sydney
Sydney Australia
Room 407, A 14

kmiller at usyd.edu.au
kristie_miller at yahoo.com
Ph: +612 9036 9663
http://www.kristiemiller.net/KristieMiller2/Home_Page.html









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