Denken in Sätzen / Thinking in Sentences
May 30–31, 2024
“The sentence wants to think”. We owe this extremely concise sentence, at once laconic and apodictic and yet—with its assignation of agency to a linguistic micro-unit—obscure, to Rainald Goetz. Goetz made a memorable appearance at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin in February 2023: he demonstrated a thought process by means of aligning sentences at breathtaking speed. But what does it mean to develop a thought as a sentence? In the literary and philosophical tradition, the individual sentence is often conceived as a unit of thought: genres such as the aphorism, the axiom, the saying, the theorem, the maxim, the mnemonic verse, the rule, the adage, and the proverb operate primarily at the sentence level. We are interested in those thinkers and writers who may be considered virtuosos of the sentence. What kinds of thinking are possible within a common sentence structure? What can be represented, communicated, and thought in sentences at all, and what cannot?
In cooperation with the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
Convener
Contact
Participants
Rüdiger
Campe
Fellow
2007/2008
Yale University
Dina
Emundts
Freie Universität Berlin
Beatrice
Gruendler
Fellow
2010/2011
Freie Universität Berlin
John T.
Hamilton
Fellow
2005/2006
Harvard University
Andrew
Hui
Fellow
2023/2024
Yale-NUS College, Singapur
Angelika
Linke
Fellow
2009/2010
Universität Zürich
Christoph
Möllers
Permanent Fellow
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Glenn W.
Most
Fellow
1988/1989
Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa/The University of Chicago
Gilles
Philippe
Université de Lausanne
Johanna
Schumm
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
Pauline
Solvi
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
Florian
Fuchs
Princeton University