The neuroscience of Helmholtz and the theories of Johannes Müller. Part 1: Nerve cell structure,vitalism, and the nerve impulse

Hermann Helmholtz made monumental contributions to the neural sciences in the second half of the nineteenth century. Among his earliest achievements were experiments that challenged vitalism, microscopic studies on the structure of the nerve cell and its processes, and the first reasonable estimates of the speed of nerve transmission based on physiological experiments. In this, the first of a two-part article, we review Helmholtz's early contributions in biographical context and with reference to Johannes Müller's own thoughts. We reveal how Johannes Müller, considered by many to be the greatest physiologist of the first half of the nineteenth century, helped to launch and shape Helmholtz's career. We also show that Helmholtz was only willing to accept some of his mentor's theories, even though he had great admiration for Müller. The point will be made that Helmholtz owed a great debt to Müller, but even from his student days in Berlin he was an independent thinker with his own agenda, and never his strict disciple.     

The Neuroscience of Helmholtz and the Theories of Johannes Müller

In this, our continuation paper on Helmholtz and Müller, we examine Helmholtz’s contributions to sensation and perception, with emphasis on his extension and modification of Müller’s theory of specific nerve energies. The material is again presented in biographical-chronological context. We also examine Helmholtz’s views on depth and space perception, and his empirical theory of knowledge, which are also compared to Mutter’s views. It will be shown that Helmholtz remained stimulated by the thoughts and doctrines of Johannes Müller in the sensory-perceptual part of his career, which began early in the 1850s and ended with his death. Nevertheless, Helmholtz’s own experiments and new discoveries by others sometimes led him to quite different conclusions.     

The Neuroscience of Helmholtz and the Theories of Johannes Müller Part 1: Nerve Cell Structure,Vitalism, and the Nerve Impulse

Hermann Helmholtz made monumental contributions to the neural sciences in the second half of the nineteenth century. Among his earliest achievements were experiments that challenged vitalism, microscopic studies on the structure of the nerve cell and its processes, and the first reasonable estimates of the speed of nerve transmission based on physiological experiments. In this, the first of a two-part article, we review Helmholtz's early contributions in biographical context and with reference to Johannes Müller's own thoughts.We reveal how Johannes Müller, considered by many to be the greatest physiologist of the first half of the nineteenth century, helped to launch and shape Helmholtz's career. We also show that Helmholtz was only willing to accept some of his mentor's theories, even though he had great admiration for Müller. The point will be made that Helmholtz owed a great debt to Müller, but even from his student days in Berlin he was an independent thinker with his own agenda, and never his strict disciple.     

Facts and Philosophy in Neurophysiology. The 200th Anniversary of Johannes Müller (1801–1858)

Johannes Müller was the founder of the first school of physiology in Germany. His anatomical, morphological and physiological research as well as his epistemological view of scientific medicine opened the way to a deeper understanding of the structure and the function of the organism. With important discoveries like the law of sense energy, the reflex movement and the definition of different organic stimuli, he enriched the knowledge of neuroanatomy, neurophysiology and sensory physiology and smoothed the way to an experimental physiology. All his famous students like Hermann von Helmholtz, Emil Du Bois-Reymond, Ernst Brücke, Jakob Henle, Robert Remak, Rudolf Virchow and Ernst Haeckel solved many crucial research problems, which Müller identified and pointed out to them as open questions, due to the insufficient methods of investigation. Müller's research method, epistemological view of biological sciences, and his open-minded personal style encouraged the development of new methods adapted to particular problems.     

Life Narratives of the Past: Herta Müller on Communist Romania

Narratives of the past are created and, in some cases, recreated, through literary works by revealing fragments from past traumas, reinterpreting past events, or focusing on historical events held in the collective memory. In a text dedicated to excavation and memory, Walter Benjamin notes that when approaching one’s personal past, one must proceed like a person digging in the ground, and not be afraid of returning repeatedly to the same matter. This essay argues that Herta Müller uses this method to address the personal and collective Romanian past, creating through her novels a literary remembrance of the past that deeply resonates with the memories of those affected by totalitarian regimes. Never presenting a linear or whole narrative of the past but rather the pieces of a life-narrative puzzle, Müller’s literary world becomes a medium through which the victims of totalitarian regimes can regain control over the narratives of their past.     

The Indo‐European mirror: Monotheism and polytheism (J.G. Herder,E. Renan,A. Pictet,F.M. Müller and R.F. Grau)

Some authors assigned the Indo‐Europeans a mirror‐like role which allowed them to understand their own position with respect to contemporary Christian values. After dealing briefly with the writings of J.G. Herder, I shall evoke a certain number of questions which oriented the research of E. Renan, F.M. Müller, A. Pictet and R.F. Grau. The works of the latter authors expounded fabulous genealogies, organizing them into explanatory systems that radically opposed Hebrew monotheists to Indo‐European polytheists. Thus, depending on whether they had used the Semites or the Indo‐Europeans as their starting‐point, they concluded that monotheism or polytheism, respectively, was the archaic source of human thought. The goal on their horizon was a ressuscitated West, forever in the forefront of progress, often simultaneously Christian and scientific. If this type of historiographic analysis is urgently needed at the present time, its purpose is not to provide a grid for distinguishing “truth”; from “falsehood,”; but rather to grasp a set of scholarly traditions within its own channels of transmission.     

‘How to handle eternity’: infinity and the theories of J.W. Dunne in the fiction of Jorge Luis Borges and Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman

This essay examines the importance of the notion of infinity to the work of Flann O'Brien and Jorge Luis Borges. Using as a starting point their shared interest in the Irish-born popular scientist J.W. Dunne's highly eccentric theories about the ‘multidimensional’ nature of time, the essay goes on, through a close analysis of a number of Borges' stories and of O'Brien's novel The Third Policeman, to call attention to a fundamental affinity between these two ostensibly quite different authors. A case is ultimately made for a consideration of Borges and O'Brien as writers with remarkably similar views on fiction and the universe.     

The challenge of the spaceship: Arthur C. Clarke and the history of the future, 1930–1970

Arthur C. Clarke’s 1946 essay on ‘The Challenge of the Spaceship’ was one of the founding manifestoes of the Space Age, and helped to establish him as the West’s leading techno-prophet. Restating his ideas in subsequent factual and fictional works, Clarke successfully propagated the belief that man’s destiny lay in space and that the process was already underway. On the surface Clarke’s oeuvre offers a classic astrofuturist model of progress as technology-driven, but on closer examination it also incorporates a more pessimistic, historically based strand of philosophy, British rather than American. This essay traces the genesis of Clarke’s early work and the influence upon him of the historian Arnold J. Toynbee and the moral philosophers Olaf Stapledon and C.S. Lewis. Toynbee was essentially a Christian pessimist who believed that western civilization was on the way out; his long historical perspectives were an important source of inspiration for Clarke, leading him to a cyclical rather than a simply progressive model of history which contemplated both the beginning and the end of civilizations. The concerns of Stapledon and Lewis with grand narratives of decline and redemption were also influences on Clarke. All this needs to be understood in relation to both the European experience of World War I and to the coming of the atomic bomb, the latter a profound influence on Clarke’s generation. Such perspectives gave European astroculture a more modulated vision of the human future in space than the technologically based astrofuturism which dominated in the USA.