The German Department 2025 Cassirer Lecture and Seminar presents
Prof. Dr. Anja Lemke, Professor of German Literature, University of Cologne and Director of the Erich Auerbach-Institute for Advanced Studies:
“Possible Worlds, Contingency and Potentiality. Leibniz in the Configuration of Possible Worlds in the Novel around 1800”.
Contingency and potentiality, as two possible translations of Aristotle’s concept of dynamis, gradually emerged as a new epistemological and social theoretical paradigm in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. How this paradigm configured itself, what tensions were involved, what came to the fore and what remained latent, can be observed in an outstanding way in the genre of the novel around 1800. Starting from Leibniz’s model of possible worlds, the lecture will examine how and why the novel became the crossroads of the discourses involved in this paradigm shift, how it intertwined the epistemic and representational lines of theory that formed the new order of knowledge, and how it opened up the space in which both the unfolding of the possible on the one hand and its various attempts to contain and discipline it on the other could be traced.
Sign up for the seminar no later than 27 March: https://forms.gle/KwZEzawZbHe4LDgV9.