academics-from-germany

"The strongest argument for the truth of Christianity is the true Christian, the man filled with the Spirit of Christ. [...] The best proof of Christ's resurrection is a living Church, which itself is walking in new life, and drawing life from him who has overcome death."

"What Christianity in her antagonism with every form of unbelief most needs is holy living."

"Separation, therefore, is one main business of the mythologist."

"While Kekrops’ Egyptian origin is merely historical sophism, that of Danaos is genuine myth."

"In order to assume this just for one [myth] even, distinct proof is required either of so great internal agreement as only to be explained by transplantation or, secondly, that the mythos is absolutely without root in the soil of local tradition, or, lastly, that transplantation is expressed in the legend itself."

"Most later historians, and some of his contemporaries, have regarded Müller as essentially Romantic in maintaining a categorical distinction between Greek and other cultures. In Orchomenos he denied the charge and, after apologizing for having treated Greek mythology as if it were all mythology, he claimed that Greece was part of the world, and that therefore Greek mythology had the same basis as that of the rest of mankind. What he objected to was the belief in colonial bonds and the wholesale borrowing of Greek religion and mythology from the East. He was convinced that he had shown these to be unhistorical, though illusions about them had led all previous research astray. In Prolegomena, Müller made an eloquent appeal for scholars to do what he had failed to do, and investigate all mythologies for insights into the Greek one. The ‘anthropological’ school of the Cambridge Classicists James Frazer and Jane Harrison, which flourished at the beginning of the 20th century, in no way overstepped these bounds. What Müller outlawed was any special relationship between Greek and Eastern myth. Indeed, as he put it, ‘the entire book is opposed to the theory which would make the majority of myths importations from the East.’"

"the entire book is opposed to the theory which would make the majority of myths importations from the East."

"Nearly all this, however, has stayed within the bounds set in the 1820s by the man who destroyed the Ancient Model, Karl Otfried Müller. Müller urged scholars to study Greek mythology in relation to human culture as a whole, but was adamantly opposed to recognizing any specific borrowings from the East. When it comes to higher culture, there has been an even greater reluctance to see any precise parallels."

"It is also important to bear in mind that this present struggle, tremendous and unique as it may seem, is not the first of its kind, but is really nothing other than the present phase of a contest which has been going on between East and West for thousands of years. Action on the part of one side has always immediately called forth a reaction on the part of the other, and one may rightly doubt whether the Occident has always supplied the action, and the Orient the response, as is now the case, or whether the initiative has not rather changed from one side to the other in the course of history."

"We console ourselves, for the most part, with the superiority of our cultivation, which we consider to be qualitatively ‘higher,’... One reveres the uniqueness of Greek Geist, but with closer contact with this Asian world one cannot help raising the suspicion that our feelings of superiority are built on the quicksand of ignorance."

"Well, the Germans, too, are surrounded by a “great wall.” This wall is not built of masonry, but is spiritual. Anything outside the wall is regarded with contempt. But when such a superior person goes abroad, and finds how much he has been misinformed, he is apt, unless he is a person of very stable temperament, to rush to the opposite extreme, and thence to look down upon all that he has previously venerated. That is why so many Germans who go abroad are lost to Germany. But one who, having gone abroad, remains a good German and wants to enlighten his fellow-countrymen is not understood at home and is despitefully used."

"If the West’s roots lay in Griechentum, he wrote, “‘... [our western culture] has also been influenced and made fruitful by the Orient, in many and lasting ways, and that ought not to be forgotten or left unsaid. It was, precisely, German scholars whose hard work established these facts and contributed the foundations for a truly historical, and comprehensive, understanding of European cultural development.’"

"Theologians like F. C. Baur resisted and followed Creuzer, insisting instead on a universal diffusionary history with its roots in the Orient. In his own two-volume Symbolik und Mythologie of 1824-5, Baur argued that world history was at once “‘a revelation of the divine (der Gottheit)” and “the evolution of Consciousness,” and neither of these processes had begun in Europe. Using Creuzer, Genesis, and the Zend Avesta, Baur traced the formation of the first mythologies back to a ‘‘primeval seat” [Ursiz] in “the Edenic highlands of Central Asia” between the Jaxartes and the Oxus, Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Stressing the similarities between religious ideas across cultures, Baur readily admitted Europe’s dependence on the Orient for its population and ‘‘a great portion of its culture.’’ This also allowed him to lay the foundations for what he believed to be a scientific history of religious one philosophy, one which would put the evolution of Christianity into proper perspective — without compromising its unique truth."

"Peter von Bohlen claimed in 1835, the historian of the Orient must treat all people equally: ‘... he must learn to regard the wonders, which belong to the very spirit of the ancient legends, as an inviolable national inheritance, neither setting them aside by forced interpretations, nor proscribing them as the offspring of pure imagination or intentional deception, but simply endeavoring to discover the original nucleus of fact... .”” Moreover, he continued, the historical critic must strive, “unbiased by preconceived opinion, fully to understand and fairly to estimate the individual character of every people, according to their own standard of perfection, their peculiar turn of thought and their mode of action... .”"

"Rather more idiosyncratically, the geographer Carl Ritter published a Creuzerian study of Europe’s peoples before Herodotus in which he suggested that the true source of religious ideas and of “‘civilization’s seeds” was not Egypt or South Asia but northern India. Here, all had shared a Buddha cult, one that included “a common belief in a single, highest God, a God of peace, and a belief in immortality, together with many dogmas, priestly teachings and priestly institutions, such as reincarnation, rebirth, the Flood, the final salvation... .” Religious sectarianism, however, had forced a Babel-like dispersal of this culture, provoking the wandering of Indian priests throughout Europe and Central Asia; they brought the Buddha cult with them, laying the foundations for a shared Graeco-oriental mythology ~— and also clearly laying the foundations for a later, Judeo-Christian revelation. Drawing heavily on Creuzer, as well as on the latter’s beloved late Greek sources, Ritter explicitly sought to decenter a Roman view of Europe’s prehistory by substituting one that insisted upon a shared primeval monotheism and the “common roots” of the ancient Thracians, Germanic tribes, Indians, Greeks, Scythians, and Persians."

"There is still a lot of critical discussion on the GDPR in Europe, and there are some valid arguments in it. I believe however that on the overall, the GDPR can become a tool for improving trust in digital technologies without putting the brakes on them. It could become a sort of blueprint for other regions of the world, as it sets a relatively clear regulatory framework for people to sell their data. This issue is certainly seen in a more liberal way in the US, where the use of data is not considered per se as problematic as in Germany, in particular. But still, there are a lot of critics in the US too, and a – revised and refined – GDPR could address these."

"When sitting on the German federal ethics committee for autonomous driving, I had a lot of discussions with representatives from automotive companies who felt the same way about this kind of technology: They were equally looking for academia and government to help them address ethical problems. There are some problems a single company – or even industry as a whole – cannot address on their own: These range from questions like how to organize AI accountability issues to very fundamental philosophical problems such as: How much dependence on certain technologies are we willing to accept as a society?"

"The digital world is a mirror of society in many ways. Of course, there are a lot of activities going on which people would not openly admit to, some of them illegal, certainly. However, I am not sure that privacy (and in particular, privacy with respect to illegal activities) has increased when compared to the non-digital world. Was it not worse in a time when dictatorships around the world could shield their citizens from information from the outside or when companies could hide their activities easily without having to worry about the power of social networks? So in this regard, I believe we cannot complain about too much privacy in the digital world – in some ways at least, we had more privacy in the old days, with bad consequences sometimes. Still, I agree of course that disclosure of information is essential in many digital contexts and too much privacy can have bad consequences too."

"This is a very unique opportunity to work on ethical issues in a new technology on such a scale. It comes at a point in time when AI is on the forefront of a large number of both scientific and public debates. We have the chance to work on AI ethics issues in detail, and not just by doing research behind closed doors, but with an outreach to civil society, politics, and the corporate world."

"If innovation is considerably stifled, it cannot bring about its ethical potential."

"First, I always state that there are no obligations whatsoever towards Facebook. The new institute is an independent research institute, which will also have an independent Advisory Board with no members of Facebook sitting on it. The money comes as a gift for research. It will be used to help make AI systems more ethical, not just by putting together some abstract principles, but by working on concrete issues, like algorithms, systems, robots or screening technologies, for example. Therefore, if the money from Facebook can be employed for advancing ethics and bringing (ethical) benefits to the users of AI (which we all either soon will be or already are), it will be beneficial for all sides."

"This is not a simple yes or no question. In general however, I believe regulation should be approached with caution at this point. The digitech markets are still very dynamic, and that has to be taken into account. It should also be clear beforehand that specific regulation would achieve the goals it aims at and not be counterproductive: if innovation is considerably stifled, it cannot bring about its ethical potential. Therefore, I favor an approach that relies on ethical guidelines first, and in which all parts of society participate."

"It is the snowdrop on the hard German snow. It announces the German spring. It is a real consolation to every German who was ready to doubt whether the German soul would ever escape from the enchantment in which its pursuit of Power seemed to have inextricably involved it. That, in the midst of anger and hatred, misery and despair, this German flower could bloom is not only a glad hope for those to whom true Germanism is their spiritual home, but for other countries which feared that the de-Germanised German had come to stay."

"The past fifteen years of laboratory-scale gravitational experimentation have been marked by many new and exciting developments. The field received a lot of impetus by the hypothesis of a ”” ... in 1986. This very testable new force would have been a blatant violation of the equivalence principle. The evidence for the 5th force was partially based on a reanalysis of the torsion balance data of of the early 1900’s. Immediately several groups around the world started to do . The availability of new technologies combined with many new and creative ideas quickly led to several refined measurements by which the 5th force in its postulated form could be conclusively ruled out. However, the physics community was once again reminded of the importance of the equivalence principle which lies at the foundation of general relativity. Tests of the equivalence principle become particularly important for , most of which predict an equivalence principle breakdown at some level. In addition it is generally believed that the can only be complete with the existence of new particles which could exist at high masses as well as at the ultra low energies. The latter frontier being covered by laboratory-gravity tests."

"We report the first results from a new that uses a 3 ton source mass which slowly rotates around the . The highly symmetric pendulum consists of a - composition suspended from a thin torsion fiber. The counter-balanced source is shaped to minimize s."

"... Newton’s revelations about gravity were motivated by the availability of quantitative observational data of the . His theory seemed to be a complete and well-proven concept and it held for centuries. It was not until the last century that Einstein derived gravitation from the underlying spacetime concept. Einstein’s work was not provoked by observational facts, but was motivated on a purely theoretical basis, which makes his formalism and prediction particularly elegant. General Relativity presented a big change in concept beyond Newton and it predicted specific phenomena. These effects have been verified experimentally and to this date are being tested to higher and higher accuracy. The classical tests were: and . Einstein’s General Relativity corrections are now being used on an everyday basis. A typical example is the , where General Relativity effects yield a combined effect of 38 per day. The accuracy to which General Relativity can be confirmed is entirely limited by experimental uncertainties and none of the uncertainty originates from the theoretical description, since General Relativity has no adjustable parameters. It seems that to date, gravity is exactly described by General Relativity."

"In the Vedas as well as in the older portions of the Zind-Avesta (see the Gathas), there are sufficient traces to be discovered that the Zoroastrian religion arose out of a vital struggle against a form which the Brahminical religion had assumed at a certain early period.‘ ... “These facts throw some light upon the age in which that great religious struggle took place, the consequence of which was the entire separation of the Ancient Iranians from the Brahmans and the foundation of the Zoroastrian religion. It must have occurred at the time when Indra was the chief god of the Brahmans."

"Martin Haug explained it, than to shifts in power balances such that resistance now seemed futile. But interestingly, Haug was willing to “unlearn much that he had learnt in Europe” and to accept ‘‘the fact that European scholarship must often stand corrected before Indian tradition....”"

"With the introduction of the horse into Mesopotamia, early in the second millennium B.C., the onager disappears from the list of animals in the service of man."

"If I have succeeded in throwing one or two rays of light on these fragments of the true songs of Zarathustra, rescued from a 4,000 year-old past, ... I will be richly rewarded for the indescribable difficulty and the great sacrifices I had to make."

"Dr. Haug, in his introduction to the Aitareya Brahman, has observed that: "The sattras (sacrificial sessions), which lasted for one year, were nothing but an imitation of the Sun's yearly course. They were divided into two distinct parts, each consisting of six months of thirty days each. In the midst of both was the Vishuvat, i.e. the equator or central day, cutting the whole sattra into two halves.""

"As the children [of the Gods], these Germanic tribes burst forth into the midst of Semitico-Roman culture and lent it the pure strength of their blood. . . . As soon as they entered history, with the frankness of their blue eyes, their proud heroic stature, their simple patriarchal customs, their free communal associations, their loyal warlike confederations, their representations of the gods and their simple, honest, heroic traditions, they must undoubtedly have appeared from the outset as the true manifestation, without blurring or mixing, of the most noble ancient branch of the white race. Such is the Aryan."

"Let them not be discouraged if the results be not so flattering to their self-love as they anticipated. So far as their researches disclose what is good and proper in their religion, they must strengthen the belief in its divine origin; and so far as they disclose what is bad and improper, they merely indicate the corruptions introduced by human tradition. Such corruptions can be neither concealed nor defended with safety; but when discovered, they must be rejected as mere human inventions and superstitious errors. All religions have passed through human minds and human hands. .. ."

"This position is significant, since the low- lands of north-western Asia were almost certainly populated by wild horses. It is conceivable that domestication may have begun in such an area."

"There is not a single cultural element of Central Asian, Eastern European or Caucasian origin in the archaeological culture of the Mittanian area [….] But there is one element novel to Iraq in Mittanian culture and art, which is later on observed in Iranian culture until the Islamisation of Iran: the peacock, one of the two elements of the 'Senmurv', the lion-peacock of the Sassanian art. The first clear pictures showing peacocks in religious context in Mesopotamia are the Nuzi cylinder seals of Mittanian time. There are two types of peacocks: the griffin with a peacock head and the peacock dancer, masked and standing beside the holy tree of life. The veneration of the peacock could not have been brought by the Mittanians from Central Asia or South-Eastern Europe; they must have taken it from the East, as peacocks are the type-bird of India and peacock dancers are still to be seen all over India. The earliest examples are known from the Harappan culture, from Mohenjo-daro and Harappa: two birds sitting on either side of the first tree of life are painted on ceramics. [….] The religious role of the peacock in India and the Indian-influenced Buddhist art in China and Japan need not be questioned" .... "The peacock was therefore subordinated to Indra and connected with the thunderbolt, so that in some Buddhist images Indra is sitting on a peacock throne. It is even possible to trace the peacock as the 'animal of the battle' in Elam till the late 3rd millennium B.C - if it is possible to identify two figured poles from Susa with 'peacock' symbols" ... "Yet the development of the Andronovo culture did not start before 1650-1600 B.C. So that we are forced to accept that the Indo-Aryans in what is now Iran, especially Eastern Iran before 1600 B.C., were under the Indian influence for such a long period that they could have taken over the peacock veneration. In that case, they could not be part of the Andronovo culture, but should have come to Iran centuries before."

"Archaeologists point out that there is not a single cultural element of central Asian, eastern European, or Caucasian origin in the archaeological culture of the Mitannian area.... In contrast to this lacuna, Brentjes draws attention to the peacock element that recurs in Mitannian culture and art in various forms (to be eventually inherited by the Iranians), a motif that could well have come from India, the habitat of the peacock. Since this motif is definitely evidenced in the Near East from before 1600 B.C.E., and quite likely from before 2100 B.C.E., Brentjes (1981) argues that the Indo-Aryans must have been settled in the Near East and in contact with India from well before 1600 B.c.E.32 The corollary of this is that the Indo-Aryans "could not be part of the Andronovo culture [a culture dated around 1650-1600 B.C.E. with which they are usually associated], but should have come to Iran centuries before, at the time when the Hittites came to Anatolia"."

"The inspired network of the hymnic portion of the three Vedas, called the Yajur-, Sâma-, and Atharva- Veda, is apparently closer drawn than that of the other writings just named: but now that it is laid open before the investigating mind of modern Europe and India; now that the spell is broken which made the study of the Veda consist of intonating its verses to the melody of the Guru, and mechanically committing them to memory; now that native and European industry has given us in print not merely the obscure words of the hymns, but also the commentaries which lead us to their inner meaning, no Hindu can shrink from the duty of examining the grounds on which the inspiration of these three Vedas rests.”)"

"Oldenberg was well aware of the Christian, medievalizing aspects of Holtzmann’s work. He accurately diagnosed Holtzmann’s work as having, “full of enthusiasm for the newly discovered idea of Indo-Germanic tradition, seen Germanic tribes in the Indians.”"

"In the worst days of Roman Catholicism, when the multitude professing that religion was steeped in ignorance and its worship was no better than idolatry, there was still a considerable portion of its priesthood fully acquainted with the text-book of Christianity. It was no doubt, with its priests a question of policy whether their flock should be admitted to the knowledge which they possessed, and restored to a purer faith; but that they had the power to work that change is borne out by the history of Protestantism."

"[A] sign of ancient brutality . . . common to both the Mahābhārata and the Nibelungenliede [is that] the blood of the slain foe is drunk. As he had already sworn at the game, Bhīmasena drinks the blood of Duḥ çāsana who is slain by him and calls out: never did I drink so sweet (this is even better than wine, it is said in the Nibelungenlied). This trait was too horrific to the later redactors; with lamentable sophistry they present the state of affairs as though Bhīmasena never really drank the blood, it reached his lips and not his throat and then he spat it out again."

"If we were ever to succeed in determining the oldest cultural stage of the Indian race . . . and to dissolve away almost by means of a chemical process all influences of . . . Brahmanism . . . we would find conditions before us only a little different from those described by Tacitus as unique to the ancient Germans. But even in its contemporary ruined form the Mahābhārata often delivers us the best commentary on Germania. Here we read of the passion for gambling of the Germans, of how they wagered possessions and property, wife and child, [and] finally even themselves: extremo ac novissimo iactu de liberate contendunt [sic]."

"Holtzmann Jr. saw himself as taking up arms on behalf of a lost antiquity. As was typical of the Romantic age, he valued the old merely because it was old."

"As was true of Romanticism in general, Holtzmann activated an ideal of the past as an element of a critique of modernity itself. This made his work, for all its restorative tendencies, thoroughly modern. If Lassen was the founder of German Mahābhārata studies, Holtzmann Jr. can, with justification, be called the father of modern Mahābhārata studies."

"We may, therefore, still entertain the hope that the regeneration of Hinduism will proceed from these schools, provided that they possess the energy to refuse any compromise with sectarian worship, which has brought Hinduism into contempt and ridicule. The means which they possess for combating that enemy is as simple as it is irresistible; a proper instruction of the growing generation in its ancient literature, an instruction, however wholly different from that now constituting the education of a Hindu youth; to whom reading the Veda is jabbering thoughtlessly the words of the verse, or intoning it to the melody of a teacher as ignorant as himself of its sense; who, by studying grammer, understands cramming his memory with some grammatical forms, without any notion as to the linguistic laws that regulate them; who believes that he can master philosophy or science by sticking to the textbook of one school and disregarding its connexion with all the rest of the literature. That such a method and such a division of labour do not benefit the mind is amply evidenced by the crippled results which they have brought to light. The instruction which India requires, though adapted to her peculiar wants—religious, scientific, and political—must be based on that system which has invigorated the European mind; which, free from the restrictions of rank or caste, tends to impart to it independence of thought and solidity of character."

"The whole foundation of Mueller's date [for the Rigveda] rests on the authority of Somadeva, the author of 'an Ocean of (or rather for) the River of Stories' who narrated his tales in the twelfth century after Christ. Somadeva, I am satisfied, would not be a little surprised to learn that 'a European point of view" raises a 'ghost story' of his to the dignity of an historical document. Neither is there a single reason to account for his allotting 200 years to the first of his periods, nor for his doubling this amount of time in the case of the Sutra period."

"... On my father’s side, I come from a family of artists and architects. My grandfather was a Bauhaus architect in Germany and my grandmother was a painter. When my father as a child was tinkering around in the basement with chemistry sets, his mother said to him, “You’ll never make a living in science. Why don’t you go into the family business, the arts?” Well, he defied that advice. He was actually a PhD student with Heisenberg in Göttingen, and then a post-doc with Enrico Fermi in Chicago. After that he went to Caltech where he switched to biology and became one of the founders of the field of molecular biology. He founded the department of molecular biology at the . My mother was from a town on the Swiss-German border called , and she actually got her PhD in biology at age 22."

""What is the Universe made of?" The question is one of the deepest unanswered mysteries in all of human existence. Solving the puzzle has been my life's work and is the hottest research topic in cosmology and particle physics today."

"... in the seventies the work of and Rubin ... looked at galaxies and found evidence for dark matter in every single one."

"s and massive s in the mass range 2–20 have been proposed as candidates to provide the in the halo of our galaxy."

"Gordan, eine in sich geschlossene Individualität, war kräftig und einheitlich im Leben und in der Arbeit. Kein Neuerer in der Wissenschaft: er griff nur an, was seiner Art gemäß war; aber was er angriff, führte er nnermüdlich durch bis zu Ende. Aus dem Stoffe selbst heraus neue kombinatorische Methoden zu schaffen und seine Instrumente kräftig zu handhaben, das war sein mächtiges Können: er war Algorithmiker."