Dean's Lecture Series: Daniel Carranza - Goethe on What Plants Want

Daniel Carranza delivers his lecture, "Vital Exuberance: Goethe on What Plants Want," in the auditorium 09/15/2023 The lecture conducts a close reading of Goethe's poem on the "Metamorphosis of Plants" by situating it within Goethe's larger scientific endeavor to understand what it means for a being to be a specifically living being, in particular what the kind of wholeness exhibited by the organism, whether plant, animal, or human, looks like. Particular attention will be paid to the philosophical resources upon which Goethe draws in his scientific investigation of nature, in particular Aristotle's four causes, the fourth, formal one of which is decisive for Goethe's morphology or study of living forms, and Spinoza's conatus, which Goethe understood as the organism's own endeavor to persevere in and more fully realize its own being. Prof. Carranza is an assistant professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Germanic Languages & Literatures at Harvard University.
For a list of remaining lectures, please visit the Formal Lecture Series page on our website www.sjc.edu/an...
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