Intuition, Jumping Around, and Other Methods

03. November 2010 / Making-of

Experience Experiments (Intuition, Jumping Around, and Other Methods)

“The most lively thought is still inferior to the dullest sensation.” Hume, 1739

I. Morning

Empiricists; Frei Otto partners with matter; presuppositions; a role of theory; Doubt & Descartes; Epic Theater (Brecht’s rules of); double blind; Pepsi challenge; Tuskegee; MilgramExperiments; Sackett’s 56 biases; social psychology’s ‘will you go to bed with me’; mad scientists

Readings:
Gilles Deleuze: Bergsonism: „Intuition as Method“; „A Return to Bergson“
Michel Serres with Bruno Latour: Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time: “Method”
Erwin Schrodinger, What is Life?: “The Naïve Physicist’s Approach to the Subject”

Experiment: soap films

II. Afternoon

History of Nature lecture: Aristotle 4 causes, observation to experiment, Galileo, Bacon, Christopher Wren kills dogs, Linnaeus, Buffon, le Notre, Darwin, Smithson, Self-organization, far from equilibrium

Readings:
Raymond Williams: Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society
Daniel Botkin: Discordant Harmonies: “A View From a Marsh: Myths and Facts about Nature”, 3-13.
Bruno Latour: Introduction to We Have Never Been Modern