Intoxicated Ways of Knowing

The Untold Story of Intoxicants and the Biological Subject in Nineteenth-Century Germany

Matthew Perkins-McVey (Autor)

Buch | Softcover

320 Seiten

2026
University of Chicago Press (Verlag)
978-0-226-84613-2 (ISBN)

Artikel merken

Argues that intoxication was fundamental to German physiological, psychological, and psychiatric research during the nineteenth century.

Intoxicating substances can be found lurking in every corner of modern life, and Matthew Perkins-McVey’s pathbreaking book offers the untold story of how they were implicated in shifting perceptions of embodiment found in the emerging sciences of the body and mind in late-nineteenth-century Germany. Their use in this experimental context gave rise to a dynamic conception of the subject within the scientific, psychological, philosophical, and sociological milieu of the era. The history of the modern biological subject, Perkins-McVey argues, turns on “intoxicated ways of knowing.”

Intoxicated Ways of Knowing identifies the state of intoxication as a tacit form of thinking and knowing with the body. Intoxicants force us to feel, intervening directly in our perceptional awareness, and, Perkins-McVey contends, they bring latent conceptual associations into the foreground of conscious thought, engendering new ways of knowing the world. The book unfurls how intoxicants affected nineteenth-century German science and how, ultimately, the connection between mental life and intoxication is taken up in the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Weber, and Sigmund Freud, bringing the biological subject out of the lab and into the worlds of philosophy, psychoanalysis, sociology, and politics.

Matthew Perkins-McVey is assistant professor of the history and philosophy of science and medicine at Technion Israel Institute of Technology.

Convergences

Part I. Vital Substances
1. Pharmacy Bodies
2. Brown, Kant, and the Crisis in Medicine
3. Brunonian Naturphilosophie and Intoxicated Knowing
4. A (Brief) Historical Ontology of an Alkaloid

Part II. Contra Intoxicatio
5. Great Expectations: The Humboldts, Johannes Müller, and the Rise of Neomechanism
6. The “Young” Neomechanists and the Problem of the Brain
7. A Tale of Two Cities: Berlin, Leipzig, and Scientific Psychology

Part III. The Intoxicated Subject
8. A Postalkaloidal “Golden Age” of Intoxication
9. The Life and Times of Emil Kraepelin: Drugs, Bodies, and Minds
10. Kraepelin’s Nosology and an Intoxicated “Physiologie der Seele”
11. Drunken Songs of Tomorrow: Nietzsche, Freud, Weber, and Intoxication

A Horizontal Fall

Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Erscheinungsdatum	23.12.2025
Zusatzinfo	24 halftones
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 229 mm
Gewicht	454 g
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
	Studium ► Querschnittsbereiche ► Geschichte / Ethik der Medizin
	Naturwissenschaften
ISBN-10	0-226-84613-X / 022684613X
ISBN-13	978-0-226-84613-2 / 9780226846132
Zustand	Neuware