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Born in the Hanseatic town of Bremen, Germany's smallest federal state, I'm now living right in the historic city centre of Bremen, a charming place, right in the midst between modernism and tradition. I have studied philosophy and German language and literature, and tought formal logic at the university's philosophy department. My current occupation is writing a dissertation on the German silent film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, intended to become the definite work on the subject about which I have also done my master thesis a few years ago. I got a scholarship, running Jan 2000 - Dec 2002.
I'm a film fan. What I love about films is being entertained, delighted, angered, instructed, intellectually stimulated in just about 90 mins. time. And of course, those great moments: Connie opening his eyes in Caligari, Colin Clive screaming "It's alive!" in Frankenstein, Gene Kelly's flamboyant sword fights in The Three Musketeers, Cary Grant kissing Audrey Hepburn in Charade, James Bond crossing the screen, space ships chasing through an asteroid field in The Empire Strikes Back, Homer saying another "D'oh!" on The Simpsons, and so on. Films are fantasy, they tell us about life, and they make us feel fine.
I'm a scientist. I love the detective work of scientific research. Having a question and not knowing the answer, and then going out there, trying to find that answer, finding out something we did not know before, that's what I get a kick out of. A scientist is a searcher, science is about curiosity, not certainty. You might call me an empiricist. If I were a paleontologist, I would rather diggin' up bones than making theories about the origin of dinosaurs. But that should not mean that I think data is all that counts, rather that data is the basis of knowledge. We certainly need theories that can explain the data. The good thing about theories is that they tell us something about things we have not observed so far. Therefore, when we have a theory, and then go back to observation, testing the theory, we learn even more about the nature of things than we did when we were simply looking at them. Looking at things makes us making better theories, and good theories make us sharpen our look at things. So, there is an interaction between observation and theory, and that's called science.
(And oh, that's not my dog, he just pushed himself into the picture.)
Werd' ich zum Augenblicke sagen:
Verweile doch! Du bist so schön!
Dann magst du mich in Fesseln schlagen,
Dann will ich gern zugrunde gehn!
Goethe
The best is yet to come, and won't that be fine
You think you've seen the sun, but you ain't seen it shine
Wait till the warm-up is underway
Wait till our lips have met
Wait till you see that sunshine day
You ain't seen nothin' yet
Coleman/Leigh
Einladung
zum Denken
In 1998, I co-edited this book on analytic philosophy, together with my dear
friends Daggi and Uwe, containing fourteen interviews we had done in our college
days, including talks with Willard Van Orman Quine and Stanislaw Lem. The book
is dedicated to Edward D. Wood, Jr., reminiscent of the chaotic circumstances
under which it was put together (and remembering a screening of Tim Burton's
Ed Wood Uwe and I saw in Edinburgh in 1995). A video film accompanying
the book has also been produced.
Book: ISBN 3209024596
Video: ISBN 320902460X
www.filmgeschichte.de,
a source book for early german film edited by olaf
brill & thomas schultke.
Last update (this page): 04 Jan 2004.
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