Gastvortrag Prof. Kocku v. Stuckrad:
"Encountering the Object: Poetic Science and the Limits of Constructionism in the Study of Religion"

Quite against a common prejudice, Romantic science was not so much an „aesthetic“ or „emotional“ endeavor but an attempt to arrive at a theory of nature through practices of encounter and poetic engagement. The lecture describes the main features of such a „poetic science“ and subsequently reconstructs this line of non-reductionist methods through the twentieth century. It is argued that the recent emergence of „new materialisms,“ object-oriented ontologies, and critiques of constructionist approaches is the latest chapter in these attempts at formulating a theory of nature that reflects the complexities of entanglement. Critical cultural and religious studies today can profit from these theoretical considerations.

Kocku von Stuckrad is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. He has published extensively on topics related to the cultural history of religion in Europe, method and theory in the study of religion, discursive study of religion, the diversity of knowledge systems, esoteric and mystical traditions in European intellectual history, religion and (philosophies of) nature, as well as on religion and secularity. He has written 10 books, which were translated into five languages. He has published ten edited volumes, including two leading dictionaries of religion. Together with Whitney A. Bauman, he is co-founder and co-director of Counterpoint: Navigating Knowledge, a research center and information hub, located at the interface of academic and non-academic knowledge practices and traditions.