A Workshop on European Peasants

Art critics and scholars have puzzled over the behavior of Pablo Picasso, Gerhard Richter, and Sigmar Polke, three important modern painters who have made frequent and abrupt changes of style. In each case, assuming this behavior to be idiosyncratic, the experts consequently failed to recognize its common basis. But stylistic versatility is in fact often a characteristic of conceptual innovators whose ability to solve specific problems can free them to pursue new goals. This contrasts sharply with the practice of experimental artists, whose inability to achieve their goals often ties them to a single style for an entire career. The phenomenon of the conceptual innovator who produces diverse innovations is an important and new feature of twentieth-century art; Picasso was the prototype, and he has been followed by a series of others, from Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia to Bruce Nauman and Damien Hirst. Versatility has furthermore been a characteristic not only of modern painters but also of conceptual innovators in other arts, and of conceptual scholars. Recognizing the common basis of this behavior deepens our understanding not only of twentieth-century art but also of human creativity more generally, for it adds a dimension to the contrast between conceptual and experimental innovators.     

Der Lexikograf Gerhard Wahrig – Systemgrenzen und Ressourcen: Zur Entstehung seines Projekts „Wörterbuch als Datenbank“

Systems, Boundaries and Resources: The Lexicographer Gerhard Wahrig (1923–1978) and the Genesis of his Project “Dictionary as Database”. Gerhard Wahrig’s private archive has recently been retrieved by the authors and their siblings. We undertake a first survey of the unpublished material and concentrate on those aspects of Wahrig’s bio-ergography which stand in relation to his life project “dictionary as database”, realised shortly before his death. We argue that this project was conceived in the 1950s, while Wahrig was writing and editing dictionaries and encyclopedias for the Bibliographisches Institut in Leipzig. Wahrig, who had been a wireless operator in WWII, was well informed about the development of computers in West Germany. He was influenced both by Ferdinand de Saussure and by the discussion on language and structure in the Soviet Union. When he crossed the German/German border in 1959, he experienced mechanisms of exclusion before he could establish himself in the West as a lexicographer. We argue that the transfer of symbolic and human capital was problematic due to the cultural differences between the two Germanies. In the 1970s, he became a professor of General and Applied Linguistics. The project of a “dictionary as database” was intended both as a basis for extensive empirical research on the semantic structure of natural languages and as a working tool for the average user of the German language. Due to his untimely death, he could not pursue his idea of exploring semantic networks.     

Pietism and medicine in the first half of the 18th century

In the beginning of the 18th century Halle Pietists tried to establish a specific approach to sickness and healing. They constructed close links between physical illness on the one hand and the religious concept of individual piety, penance and rebirth on the other. This new' pietist medicine largely depended on Georg Ernst Stahl's medical theory, which was not pietist in itself, but was adopted and simplified by pietist physicians. Although conclusive and rhetorically present in programmatic texts, pietist medicine turned out to be less influential on medical practice than expected.