Jocelyn Holland
Biographic Data
| ID | 3683652 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jocelyn Holland |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jocelyn |
| FAMILY NAME | Holland |
| SIGNATURE | HOLLAND J |
| AFFILIATIONS | California Institute of Technology |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7812-1329 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 2 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 20 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1986 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Uncertainty in Early German Romanticism
This introduction explores how uncertainty was used as a poetic and philosophical tool around 1800. It first sets up the historical context for the appropriation of uncertainty by underscoring the philosophical interest in challenging the foundations of knowledge. It then focuses on German Romanticism, using the writings of Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel as its primary reference point for an analysis of the poetic and philosophical implications o…
Reproduction without polarity in the work of Johann Wilhelm Ritter
Giving Voice to Anomalies: Nachtmelke and other Irregularities
If we resist the common understanding of the anomaly in terms of that which deviates from the law, or nomos, and consider its proper etymology as that which is lacking in evenness—as the introduction to this volume encourages us to do—then one discovers a history of the anomaly much more closely linked to the aesthetic. That the dominant mode of “perceiving” anomalies in this history is associated with vision likely comes as no surprise. In the s…
On the Paradigmatic Force of Anomaly
No text has shaped the contemporary understanding and analytic use of anomalies as much as Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). For Kuhn, the anomaly constitutes an exceptional moment in the ordinary course of scientific activity that eventually forces a large-scale revision of the game-rules according to which natural phenomena are investigated, explained, and predicted. Oscillating between novelty and inexplicability, Kuhn’…
Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ: German Romanticism between Leibniz and Marx by Leif Weatherby
Reviewed by: Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ: German Romanticism between Leibniz and Marx by Leif Weatherby Jocelyn Holland (bio) Leif Weatherby. Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ: German Romanticism between Leibniz and Marx. New York: Fordham University Press, 2016. 472 pages. Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ is a truly impressive work of historical scholarship. Leif Weatherby demonstrates that he has a solid grasp of the German phil…
The Silence of Ritter's Symbol ⊗
The focus of this essay is on the poetic function of the symbol ⊗ in the fragments of Johann Wilhelm Ritter and the way it is deeply imbedded in processes of construction. I argue that, through connections to materiality, this symbol functions as a nodal point that implicates the reader of Ritter's fragment project within the same operations of constructing both symbols and ideas that inform the text. This approach entails a significant departure…
Schelling and the Art of Balance: Equilibrium in the Philosophie der Kunst
This essay explores what happens when Schelling takes the concept of equilibrium and introduces it into the Philosophie der Kunst, and it takes as its point of departure the observation that equilibrium appears with both remarkable frequency and adaptability in this area of Schelling's thought. My essay then shows how in his philosophy of art, there is a kind of proliferation that leads to what might be described as a “density” of different modes…
Statics, Mechanics, Dynamics: Equilibrium around 1800
Since antiquity, equilibrium has been equated with stabilization. One still hears the resonance of being “well balanced” that remains attached to the concept in various contexts, whether in nutriti
Forum: Romanticism
A Natural History of Disturbance: Time and the Solar Eclipse
Drawing on accounts of two total solar eclipses from 1842 and 1851, this essay reads the visual phenomena associated with them-the effects of light and darkness-in terms of narrated time. Whereas the first part of the essay investigates the time of the eclipse as it is integrated into a framework of prediction and anticipation, the second part is more concerned with how the experience of the eclipse's duration is recorded. The final section then …
Introduction: Keeping Time
Introduction:Keeping Time Jocelyn Holland (bio) and Wolf Kittler (bio) Already in what they call their “pre-history,” humans kept, measured, and calculated time by looking at the revolutions of the sun, the planets, and the stars in the sky. Within the long history of time, one could define modernity by two technological innovations that shift timekeeping from the macrocosm to the microcosm. The first innovation, an initial step away from astrono…
The Archimedean Point: From Fixed Positions to the Limits of Theory
The Archimedean Point:From Fixed Positions to the Limits of Theory Jocelyn Holland (bio) and Edgar Landgraf (bio) There is no authoritative biography of Archimedes, but there are moments from his life which, apocryphal or not, have become the stuff of legend. These include accounts of Archimedes running naked through the streets after realizing that his body displaces water in the bath (“Eureka!”), how he sat musing over diagrams in the sand as s…
Sailing Ships and Firm Ground: Archimedean Points and Platforms
Sailing Ships and Firm Ground:Archimedean Points and Platforms Jocelyn Holland (bio) It is tempting to see in the life of Archimedes an event that could serve as a foundational moment to the myth of the Archimedean point, where the promised firm point from which to move the earth is itself given a basis and physical context for exposition. As earthbound as Archimedes himself, this foundation is not celestial – not a point in the far reaches of sp…
Angeln, Blatt, Constellation: Plural Forms in Nietzsche's Ueber Wahrheit und Lüge im aussermoralischen Sinne
Angeln, Blatt, Constellation:Plural Forms in Nietzsche's Ueber Wahrheit und Lüge im aussermoralischen Sinne Jocelyn Holland (bio) Krumm kommen alle guten Dinge ihrem Ziele nahe. —Nietzsche, Also sprach Zarathustra In irgend einem abgelegenen Winkel des in zahllosen Sonnensystemen flimmernd ausgegossenen Weltalls gab es einmal ein Gestirn, auf dem kluge Thiere das Erkennen erfanden. The well-known opening fable of Nietzsche's essay Ueber Wahrheit …
From Romantic Tools to Technics: Heideggerian Questions in Novalis's Anthropology
As much as primitive tools extended the reach, capacity, and power of the human body, in the course of their development they have also threatened it with extinction. Heidegger realized that what was at stake in the technics of the modern world was the capacity for a loss that would extend beyond the body to include the very being of mankind. The potential tragedy underlying these reflections is mitigated, however, by an inherent ambivalence: jus…
Introduction: Aesthetics of the Tool-Technologies, Figures, and Instruments of Literature and Art
Introduction:Aesthetics of the Tool—Technologies, Figures, and Instruments of Literature and Art Jocelyn Holland (bio) and Susanne Strätling (bio) At first glance, the tool belongs to the sphere of that which Martin Heidegger has characterized as the "subservience" (Dienlichkeit) of the thing. 1 An object with decidedly utilitarian functions, it does not achieve the status of a work of art, yet at the same time, through its instrumental pragmatis…
Goethe Yearbook 15
New, interdisciplinary essays on an array of topics ranging from Goethe and mineralogy to theories of masculinity around 1800. The Goethe Yearbook, first published in 1982, is a publication of the Goethe Society of North America and is dedicated to North American Goethe Scholarship. It aims above all to encourage and publish original English-language contributions to the understanding of Goethe and other authors of the Goethezeit, while also welc…
The Poet as Artisan: Novalis' Werkzeug and the Making of Romanticism
MENSCHENLEHRE. Der Mensch soll ein vollkommnes und Totales Selbstwerckzeug seyn. Das allgemeine Brouillon (III.297.321)1 The manuscripts of Romantic literature may have been drafted with pen and paper, but Friedrich von Hardenberg makes use of a wider arsenal of instruments with which to hammer and file everything from poetic inscriptions to battleships. A persistent interest in "das Werkzeug"—a polysemous German word which at the end of the eigh…
Man as a Drunken Town-Musician
The sciences are on stage again. 1 This self-referential assertion is less trivial and less timeless than it sounds
The Battle of Bouvines: Event History vs. Problem History
MLN - Volume 116, Number 4, September 2001 (French Issue)
From the Theory of Technology to the Technique of Metaphor: Blumenberg's Opening Move
George Henry Lewes and "Stream of Consciousness": The First Use of the Term in English
Man as a Drunken Town-Musician
The sciences are on stage again. 1 This self-referential assertion is less trivial and less timeless than it sounds
George Henry Lewes and "Stream of Consciousness": The First Use of the Term in English
From the Theory of Technology to the Technique of Metaphor: Blumenberg's Opening Move
The Battle of Bouvines: Event History vs. Problem History
MLN - Volume 116, Number 4, September 2001 (French Issue)
Man as a Drunken Town-Musician
The sciences are on stage again. 1 This self-referential assertion is less trivial and less timeless than it sounds
The Poet as Artisan: Novalis' Werkzeug and the Making of Romanticism
MENSCHENLEHRE. Der Mensch soll ein vollkommnes und Totales Selbstwerckzeug seyn. Das allgemeine Brouillon (III.297.321)1 The manuscripts of Romantic literature may have been drafted with pen and paper, but Friedrich von Hardenberg makes use of a wider arsenal of instruments with which to hammer and file everything from poetic inscriptions to battleships. A persistent interest in "das Werkzeug"—a polysemous German word which at the end of the eigh…
Goethe Yearbook 15
New, interdisciplinary essays on an array of topics ranging from Goethe and mineralogy to theories of masculinity around 1800. The Goethe Yearbook, first published in 1982, is a publication of the Goethe Society of North America and is dedicated to North American Goethe Scholarship. It aims above all to encourage and publish original English-language contributions to the understanding of Goethe and other authors of the Goethezeit, while also welc…
From Romantic Tools to Technics: Heideggerian Questions in Novalis's Anthropology
As much as primitive tools extended the reach, capacity, and power of the human body, in the course of their development they have also threatened it with extinction. Heidegger realized that what was at stake in the technics of the modern world was the capacity for a loss that would extend beyond the body to include the very being of mankind. The potential tragedy underlying these reflections is mitigated, however, by an inherent ambivalence: jus…
Introduction: Aesthetics of the Tool-Technologies, Figures, and Instruments of Literature and Art
Introduction:Aesthetics of the Tool—Technologies, Figures, and Instruments of Literature and Art Jocelyn Holland (bio) and Susanne Strätling (bio) At first glance, the tool belongs to the sphere of that which Martin Heidegger has characterized as the "subservience" (Dienlichkeit) of the thing. 1 An object with decidedly utilitarian functions, it does not achieve the status of a work of art, yet at the same time, through its instrumental pragmatis…
Angeln, Blatt, Constellation: Plural Forms in Nietzsche's Ueber Wahrheit und Lüge im aussermoralischen Sinne
Angeln, Blatt, Constellation:Plural Forms in Nietzsche's Ueber Wahrheit und Lüge im aussermoralischen Sinne Jocelyn Holland (bio) Krumm kommen alle guten Dinge ihrem Ziele nahe. —Nietzsche, Also sprach Zarathustra In irgend einem abgelegenen Winkel des in zahllosen Sonnensystemen flimmernd ausgegossenen Weltalls gab es einmal ein Gestirn, auf dem kluge Thiere das Erkennen erfanden. The well-known opening fable of Nietzsche's essay Ueber Wahrheit …
The Archimedean Point: From Fixed Positions to the Limits of Theory
The Archimedean Point:From Fixed Positions to the Limits of Theory Jocelyn Holland (bio) and Edgar Landgraf (bio) There is no authoritative biography of Archimedes, but there are moments from his life which, apocryphal or not, have become the stuff of legend. These include accounts of Archimedes running naked through the streets after realizing that his body displaces water in the bath (“Eureka!”), how he sat musing over diagrams in the sand as s…
Sailing Ships and Firm Ground: Archimedean Points and Platforms
Sailing Ships and Firm Ground:Archimedean Points and Platforms Jocelyn Holland (bio) It is tempting to see in the life of Archimedes an event that could serve as a foundational moment to the myth of the Archimedean point, where the promised firm point from which to move the earth is itself given a basis and physical context for exposition. As earthbound as Archimedes himself, this foundation is not celestial – not a point in the far reaches of sp…
A Natural History of Disturbance: Time and the Solar Eclipse
Drawing on accounts of two total solar eclipses from 1842 and 1851, this essay reads the visual phenomena associated with them-the effects of light and darkness-in terms of narrated time. Whereas the first part of the essay investigates the time of the eclipse as it is integrated into a framework of prediction and anticipation, the second part is more concerned with how the experience of the eclipse's duration is recorded. The final section then …
Introduction: Keeping Time
Introduction:Keeping Time Jocelyn Holland (bio) and Wolf Kittler (bio) Already in what they call their “pre-history,” humans kept, measured, and calculated time by looking at the revolutions of the sun, the planets, and the stars in the sky. Within the long history of time, one could define modernity by two technological innovations that shift timekeeping from the macrocosm to the microcosm. The first innovation, an initial step away from astrono…
Forum: Romanticism
Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ: German Romanticism between Leibniz and Marx by Leif Weatherby
Reviewed by: Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ: German Romanticism between Leibniz and Marx by Leif Weatherby Jocelyn Holland (bio) Leif Weatherby. Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ: German Romanticism between Leibniz and Marx. New York: Fordham University Press, 2016. 472 pages. Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ is a truly impressive work of historical scholarship. Leif Weatherby demonstrates that he has a solid grasp of the German phil…
The Silence of Ritter's Symbol ⊗
The focus of this essay is on the poetic function of the symbol ⊗ in the fragments of Johann Wilhelm Ritter and the way it is deeply imbedded in processes of construction. I argue that, through connections to materiality, this symbol functions as a nodal point that implicates the reader of Ritter's fragment project within the same operations of constructing both symbols and ideas that inform the text. This approach entails a significant departure…
Schelling and the Art of Balance: Equilibrium in the Philosophie der Kunst
This essay explores what happens when Schelling takes the concept of equilibrium and introduces it into the Philosophie der Kunst, and it takes as its point of departure the observation that equilibrium appears with both remarkable frequency and adaptability in this area of Schelling's thought. My essay then shows how in his philosophy of art, there is a kind of proliferation that leads to what might be described as a “density” of different modes…
Statics, Mechanics, Dynamics: Equilibrium around 1800
Since antiquity, equilibrium has been equated with stabilization. One still hears the resonance of being “well balanced” that remains attached to the concept in various contexts, whether in nutriti
Giving Voice to Anomalies: Nachtmelke and other Irregularities
If we resist the common understanding of the anomaly in terms of that which deviates from the law, or nomos, and consider its proper etymology as that which is lacking in evenness—as the introduction to this volume encourages us to do—then one discovers a history of the anomaly much more closely linked to the aesthetic. That the dominant mode of “perceiving” anomalies in this history is associated with vision likely comes as no surprise. In the s…
On the Paradigmatic Force of Anomaly
No text has shaped the contemporary understanding and analytic use of anomalies as much as Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). For Kuhn, the anomaly constitutes an exceptional moment in the ordinary course of scientific activity that eventually forces a large-scale revision of the game-rules according to which natural phenomena are investigated, explained, and predicted. Oscillating between novelty and inexplicability, Kuhn’…
Reproduction without polarity in the work of Johann Wilhelm Ritter
Uncertainty in Early German Romanticism
This introduction explores how uncertainty was used as a poetic and philosophical tool around 1800. It first sets up the historical context for the appropriation of uncertainty by underscoring the philosophical interest in challenging the foundations of knowledge. It then focuses on German Romanticism, using the writings of Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel as its primary reference point for an analysis of the poetic and philosophical implications o…
Philosophy (14 works) · History (12 works) · Art (11 works) · Epistemology (11 works) · Art history (8 works) · Physics (7 works) · Psychology (7 works) · Computer Science (6 works) · Literature (6 works) · German (5 works)