Humboldt University Berlin

The winter of 1900 found Max Planck in a state of intellectual desperation.

At 42 years old, this professor of theoretical physics at the University of Berlin was not a man given to radical thinking.

By temperament and training, he was deeply conservative, a physicist who believed in careful reasoning, mathematical rigor, and respect for established principles.

He had devoted much of his career to thermodynamics, that elegant science of heat and energy.

Two years later came the summons that crowned his life.

He was called to the University of Berlin, to the chair once held by the philosopher Fichte, in the capital of the rising Prussian state.

There, all through the eighteen twenties, he became the dominant thinker of the German-speaking world, a public power in the land, his lecture hall crowded, his favor sought, his system carried by his students into every corner of the country.

In Berlin, he published his great book on law and freedom and the state, and he delivered the famous lecture courses—on history, on art, on religion, on the entire long story of philosophy itself—that his followers would gather up and print after he was gone.

Last week, I started talking with Josche Bach, renowned cognitive scientist who uses the lens of artificial intelligence to understand the human mind.

He's taught and researched at Humboldt University of Berlin, the Institute for Cognitive Science in Osnabrück, the Berlin School of Mind and Brain, MIT's Media Lab, and the Harvard Program for Evolutionary Dynamics.

He's the creator of the MicroSci Cognitive Architecture, the author of Principles of Synthetic Intelligence, and the executive director of the California Institute for Machine Consciousness.

Last week, we talked about the Institute's mission, the machine consciousness hypothesis, why we actually are in a particular kind of simulation, dreaming, the role of perceptions and predictions, and a fascinating take on Searle's Chinese room.

everyone, my name is Amir Engel.

I'm professor of German at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and also a visiting professor at the Humboldt University in Berlin.

Today I'm talking with Agnes Muller about her new book, Holocaust Migration in German-Jewish Literature, which came out with Cambridge University only a few months ago.

Agnes, it's wonderful to have you on the show.

I'm Nahlah Ayed.

[gentle piano music] In 1809 in Prussia, a mid-level bureaucrat, Wilhelm von Humboldt pulled off an incredible feat, yet most people have never heard of him.

Who was Wilhelm von Humboldt? He was a scholar, he was a man of letters, he was a statesman, and he was an educational reformer.

He articulated ideals that would resonate for a long time until today.

In only 18 months, he created the world's first public education system.

The template is still being used around the world today.

But whether Humboldt’s core ideals remain, that is at issue.

Humboldt believed the main purpose of education was to create independent critical thinkers.

And that was not entirely clear in Humboldt's day, because the ideas that are attributed to Humboldt now were not published in his lifetime.

Although it was known by word of mouth, so to speak, that he had been the man behind the founding of the University of Berlin, the idea of his actually enacting a philosophy of higher education through founding the University of Berlin is a later invention, specifically an invention of the early 20th century.

And the idea of calling him the father of the modern research university is an even later invention.

I don't know that Humboldt would have known what the term research university actually means.

You know, he revamped the whole primary system in line with the precepts of Pestalozzi, and he got a lot of people to help him with that.

But he also reformed the university system.

And one of the things that he wanted to do was to provide them, universities, you know, starting with the University of Berlin and using that as a model, with an endowment.

Why? So that the university would be independent.