From cartesian doubt to heroic design
the late lia and the myth of the grand designer
pp. 155-168
in: , Phenomenology of the Winter-city, Berlin, Springer, 2016Abstract
Descartes account of urban images in his visions of a stove-heated room in southern Germany, at the turn of the 30-Year War, had been a milestone on the road to modernity. So were the laws of planetary motion discovered a decade earlier by Johannes Kepler, triggered as well by urban imagery. Descartes' whereabouts at the time were in the same jurisdiction, duchy Württemberg, as the place where a witchcraft trial were to proceed, at the same time, against Kepler's herbalist mother. In the story of the concurrent location of Katharina Kepler, a silent victim of medievalist persecution, and René Descartes, a flamboyant founder of modernity, we have two protagonists who, both in their own way, helped shut down the Middle Ages and usher modernity.