Abstract
The chapter is programmatic in its nature and introduces a new perspective in the research field of the history of science by suggesting to open up the traditional field of a history of ideas for relating the conceptualisation of ideas to the concurrent development of technologies, in this case of visual technologies.
The text corpus to exemplify this new type of relating ideas to technological development is the medical text corpus which especially either deals with material images (such as books on medicinal herbs or on the new paradigm of anatomy since Vesalius) or with mental images under the umbrella term of 'pathologies of imagination' (since Gianfranceso Pico della Mirandola's De Imagination, Venice 1501, the first ever written monograph on imagination).
The argument put forward here ponders the underlying technological forces at play that result in believing in representative image-models, which are deduced from anatomy studies in comparison to constructivist image-model, which argues along the lines of mental pathologies involving an 'out of control imagination, which is deduced from Pico's and Girolamo Cardano's writings.
The text corpus to exemplify this new type of relating ideas to technological development is the medical text corpus which especially either deals with material images (such as books on medicinal herbs or on the new paradigm of anatomy since Vesalius) or with mental images under the umbrella term of 'pathologies of imagination' (since Gianfranceso Pico della Mirandola's De Imagination, Venice 1501, the first ever written monograph on imagination).
The argument put forward here ponders the underlying technological forces at play that result in believing in representative image-models, which are deduced from anatomy studies in comparison to constructivist image-model, which argues along the lines of mental pathologies involving an 'out of control imagination, which is deduced from Pico's and Girolamo Cardano's writings.
| Translated title of the contribution | Visual technologies and pathologies of imagination in the medical discourse in Early Modernity |
|---|---|
| Original language | German |
| Title of host publication | Germanistik zwischen Tradition und Innovation. |
| Subtitle of host publication | Akten des XIII. Internationalen Germanistikkongresses Shanghai 2015 |
| Editors | Jianhua Zhu, Jin Zhao, Michael Szurawitzki |
| Place of Publication | Frankfurt Main Germany |
| Publisher | Peter Lang Publishing |
| Pages | 109-113 |
| Number of pages | 5 |
| ISBN (Electronic) | 9783631707685 |
| ISBN (Print) | 9783631668702 |
| Publication status | Published - 2018 |