Public Lecture with Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht: Imagination as Sensory Power

Lecture: Imagination as a Sensory Power: An Energy at the Edge of Human Existence

Speaker: Prof. Dr. Sepp Gumbrecht (Stanford University)

Over the past few decades, debates among analytic philosophers have brought a new clarity to the broad conceptual field of “imagination” through incisive distinctions, thereby directing intellectual attention to how this faculty is used in everyday life. Seen in this light, any focus on its effects as “sensory imagination” marks a return to classical notions about connections with aesthetic behavior. At the same time, it prompts a new reflection on the status of objects of consciousness, which, despite resembling perceptions in their physical vividness, are not dependent on environmental impressions as perceptions are. How does imagination succeed, to paraphrase a pressing contemporary question not only for scholars of the humanities: how does imagination succeed in suggesting various possibilities for transcending real existence through literary fictions and myths of higher worlds?

Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht is the Albert Guérard Professor in Literature in the Departments of Comparative Literature and of French & Italian (and by courtesy, he is affiliated with the Department of Iberian and Latin American Cultures/ILAC, the Department of German Studies, and the Program in Modern Thought & Literature). As a scholar, Gumbrecht focuses on the histories of the national literatures in Romance language (especially French, Spanish, and Brazilian), but also on German literature, while, at the same time, he teaches and writes about the western philosophical tradition (almost exclusively on non-analytic philosophy) with an emphasis on French and German nineteenth- and twentieth-century texts. In addition, Gumbrecht tries to analyze and to understand forms of aesthetic experience 21st-century everyday culture. Over the past forty years, he has published more than two thousand texts, including books, translated into more than twenty languages. In Europe and in South America, Gumbrecht has a presence as a public intellectual; whereas, in the academic world, he has been acknowledged with Honorary Doctorates (twelve in all) from universities in Canada, Denmark, Germany, Hungary, Portugal, Russia, and Georgia; with the most recent from Leuphana Universität Lüneburg (Germany) in July 2017. He has also held a large number of visiting professorships, at the Collège de France, University of Lisbon, University of Manchester, and the Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, among others. In the spring of 2017, he was a Martin Buber Fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. He recently taught in the Stanford's Bing Overseas Program at the campus in Santiago, Chile (spring quarter 2018).

• June 9, 2026: 6pm (c.t.) to 8pm (s.t.)

• Lecture Hall XV, Main Building, University of Bonn

• Open to the public – no registration required