Classically, premodern experience is seen as arising out of sense perception, imagination, and memory, serving as a means to acquire knowledge. But was this the path universally taken for experience to arise? Working Groups and individual projects in this theme challenge monolithic views of a single causal path to experience. They reveal that the epistemic qualities of experience in premodern science oscillated between the empirical and the formal, and show how experience was embedded in complex webs of epistemic practices that combined perception with reason. The research in this Theme in Focus combines the approaches of the history of science and medicine with those of the history of philosophy, philology, and area studies.
